No Banana for Jesus: How the Basics of Our Modern Diet Didn’t Appear Until the 16th Century

It’s impossible to plan a trip to Italy without tasting good pasta with tomato sauce. French dishes with sauce are, for their part, often accompanied by potatoes, sometimes soft, sometimes crunchy.

However, neither tomatoes nor potatoes are originally products found naturally in Europe, recalls Atlas Obscura based on an interactive map created by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), as well as a study conducted in 2016 and published in the journal Biological Sciences.

Today, 69% of the crops we eat come from somewhere much further afield. If humans have succeeded in producing, through technological innovations and various tools – notably greenhouses – fruits and vegetables that were not previously grown in their fields, this was done in several stages. . The first of these: the colonization of the Americas and Asia by Europeans.

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South America, a veritable gold mine for plant species

It was in the Andes, discovered by Europeans at the end of the 15th century, that tomatoes, potatoes and also quinoa first grew. During the 16th century, exchanges between the Old and New World intensified. The Spanish very quickly brought seeds to Europe. As early as 1567, potatoes grew in the Canary Islands.

These two products are just examples of hundreds of plant species found all over the world before being transported by ship and cultivated, with varying degrees of ease, elsewhere. The cocoa tree, for example, native to tropical South America, has never been successfully produced in France. On the other hand, the Spanish exported it to West Africa, now the leading cocoa-producing region in the world, but also to Southeast Asia.

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The variety of our diet made possible thanks to scientists

Europe is not left out when it comes to harvests. Before the transport of all these species, and globalization which allows access to all these products in stores all over the world, the continent already produced many fruits and vegetables. Asparagus, apples, cabbage, carrots and even beets and raspberries have always grown in Western Europe.

North America cannot say the same. 92.5% of calories consumed in Canada are derived from crops originally found only outside the region. It is thanks to the work of 20th century scientists that many species can be cultivated on the continent today.

They focused on preserving seeds found elsewhere in the world and working to make them viable under new conditions.