The Columbian Exchange I. Plants

The voyage of Christopher Columbus changed the world in many different ways. If we experience some of them only indirectly, we face others every day when eating or drinking. In fact, it was only with the discovery of the New World that important crops like potatoes, maize, tomatoes, chili peppers, cacao, peanuts and pineapple, among others, arrived in the Old World.

First Landing of Christopher Columbus by Frederick Kemmelmeyer (1760-1821) via Wikimedia Commons

Simply, many traditional foods now associated exclusively to specific countries in our collective consciousness, like tomato sauce to Italy, chocolate to Switzerland or chili peppers to India and Korea, didn’t exist before 1492. Nicotiana tabacum L., the tobacco plant, became so widely used that it became a substitute for currency in many parts of the world. In exchange, coffee and sugar were brought to the Americas, where they adapted quite well.

Theobroma cacao L., illustration from "Der Cacao und die Chocolate” by Alfred Mitscherlich,
Berlin 1859.

Changes on both sides were drastic. From the 16th century onward, farmers could choose the crops that worked better from a wide selection of plants. They could literally pick the best of two worlds. This practiceled to a sudden increase of farming and to improved yields. While cultivation of potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and cassava resulted in caloric and nutritional improvement in Europe, other crops such as tomatoes, cacao, and chili peppers increased vitamin intake and improved taste, favoring the development of local cuisine as we know it today. Since “the coming together of the continents was a prerequisite for the population explosion of the past two centuries, and certainly played an important role in the Industrial Revolution” (Crosby, 1989), we can argue that gastronomic traditions were not the only ones shaped by the biological globalization that followed Columbus’ voyage.

However, plants were not the only ones being transferred. With the expression “the Columbian Exchange”, the historian Alfred W. Crosby, in 1972, referred to the transfer of plants, animals and diseases which started between Europe and the Americas, and whose effects rapidly spread to Africa and Asia. We’ll talk later about the other two categories. [Silvana Munzi]