The voyage that fed the world

More than 500 years after Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas, his legacy is … complicated. But whether you revere or revile him, chances are very good that he shows up at your dinner table every night through the modern descendants of New World crops that Columbus and his contemporaries spread across the world.

Peru’s Inca people cultivated the first potatoes about 8,000 years before Spanish explorers took them to Europe. Hardy, nutritious, and easy to grow underground, potatoes fed Europe’s expanding population and traveled with the British into Asia, where they became a ubiquitous presence in the varied cuisines of India. Today. it’s one of the biggest crops in the world, with more than 4,000 varieties.

The Olmec and Maya people of southern Mexico started cultivating the earliest varieties of maize about 10,000 years ago, and experimentation continued throughout the Americas for thousands of years. Columbus himself brought a Caribbean variety back to Europe, and Portuguese colonists later brought it to Africa, where it quickly became a staple crop. Today, it’s the most-produced crop in America and the world.

The first wild tomatoes appeared in Ecuador about 80,000 years ago, but tomatoes, as we might recognize them, were cultivated about 7,000 years ago by the Maya and Aztec peoples. Tomatoes hit Italy in 1548, but Italians regarded the fruit with extreme suspicion for centuries. They finally hit their stride in the 17th century in Italy’s southern region and spread north through the Italian peninsula. But even today, northern Italian cuisine uses less tomato than southern dishes.