Near a Thousand Tables (34 page)

Now, however, all that was about to change. The next great revolution in the history of food was the process we have come to know as the “Columbian Exchange”: an ecological turnaround in world history, as a result of the enormous extension of global shipping routes in the early-modern period. This made it possible to transplant crops to new climates, by a mixture of adaptation and accident, in the worldwide reshuffle of biota which is the subject of the next chapter.

SEVEN
 
Challenging Evolution

Alas! What various tastes in food
Divide the human brotherhood!

—HILAIRE BELLOC,
ON FOOD

I
ts size makes it look efficient. The mature fruit of the breadfruit tree is as big as a man's head or a large melon. It resembles a well-buffeted pineapple, with higgledy-piggledy spikes« Conspicuous, ample, adaptable, the breadfruit appears, on superficial examination, to be a nutritionists dream, perhaps even a wonder food. Inside the skin of one variety, which captured the esteem of Europe in the eighteenth century, lurk large seeds, resembling chestnuts. They are good boiled and sweetened or fried. They can also be ground to flour. The flesh slices well, yields to the palate and has a flavor reminiscent of other tropical fruit. Perhaps because it can be eaten satisfactorily at different stages of ripeness, its enthusiasts contradict one another when they describe its consistency: “between yeast dumplings and batter pudding” to one set of teeth, or to another “as soft and creamy as an avocado, or runny as ripe camembert.” When he was in the Moluccas, working toward the theory of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace found that “with meat and gravy it is a vegetable superior to any I know, either in temperate or tropical countries. With sugar, milk, butter or treacle, it is a delicious pudding, having a slight and delicate but characteristic flavour, which, like that of good bread and potatoes, one never gets
tired of
.” Apart from the fairly thin skin, there is no waste.

The breadfruit was an eye-catching part of the abundance that made the South Sea islands wonderful to eighteenth-century European sailors: places of
restoration where the long-felt wants of seaboard life were supplied. Along with the sexual license of Tahitian life, on an island where “
the only god is love
,” ample fresh food helped to make the South Seas seem “certainly the paradise of the world,” according to Captain Bligh. In the lingo of modern economists, this was a world of “subsistence affluence,” where there was little specialization in food production and limited trade in food products, but where, in normal times,
abundance was spectacular
. In most islands, yams, taro and plantains contributed most to the basic diet but, when in season, breadfruit was the making of every feast—the starchy complement to the festive meats: pigs, turtles, dogs, chicken, fish and some prestigious larvae, such as the grubs of the longhorn beetle, which infests coconuts. The most widely favored method of preparation was to bake the bread-fruit whole in hot embers or in pits with hot stones. It could be also encountered in fish stews, cooked in liquids extracted from coconut. Because it is a seasonal product, and—unlike taro—cannot be left for long before harvesting, it was also prepared for drying, fermenting and smoking. It helped to communicate an illusion of nutritional richness and became a fixture in Europeans' mental picture of the South Sea island Eden in the eighteenth century.

The “inestimable benefit” of “a new fruit, a new farinaceous plant” was among the prizes that lured La Pérouse to his death in the South Pacific in 1788. The same search inspired the voyage that ended with the mutiny on the
Bounty.
Bligh's mission was to pluck a bit of the paradise of the South Pacific and transfer it to the slave hell of the Caribbean. On Jamaica, Bryan Edwards, the planter and projector who was always on the lookout for ways of improving the slave economy, believed that breadfruit could energize slaves and turn his island into a hive of industry. In consequence, Bligh was sent to Tahiti in 1787. He brought his single-minded, demonic energy to the task. Most of his men mutinied. The captain and the loyal survivors were cast adrift in mid-ocean and saved, after terrible deprivations, only by Bligh's startling ability as a navigator. Meanwhile, some of the mutineers lived in self-condemned exile with their Tahitian women on an uncharted island. Riven by predictable dissensions, most of them perished in internecine feuding. Others were hunted down and executed by the Royal Navy. After six years' bloodshed and travail, Bligh completed his mission, with an ironic twist: the breadfruit experiment proved disastrous. Breadfruit is not, in fact, particularly useful food. It lacks most nutrients except calcium and vitamin C, which is destroyed by cooking. It does not keep well. The slaves would not eat it.

It has, however, a symbolic value in the history of food. Bligh's saga sums up the tremendous labor of European navigators of the early-modern period in shifting food products around the globe, not just by way of trade but also as samples for
planting. What Al Crosby called the “Columbian Exchange” was one of the most impressive “revolutions” or—more exactly—long-term structural shifts in history; it was also one of the biggest modifications ever inflicted by man on the rest of nature. From the time that the continents began to drift apart 200 million years ago to the sixteenth century, evolution followed a broadly divergent course. Developing in isolation, the biota of each continent grew ever more distinctive. When European voyagers traversed the world and linked formerly sundered regions by sea routes, the process went into reverse. Biota were shifted around the globe on a convergent pattern. Now the descendants of merino sheep graze the Southern Hemisphere. There are wallabies in English parkland. The American prairie, which never saw a grain of wheat until the sixteenth century, nor grew it in significant amounts until the nineteenth, has become the wheat bin of the world. Coffee, which originated in Ethiopia, is sought from Java, Jamaica and Brazil. Texas and California produce one of the world's most popular kinds of rice. Chocolate and peanuts, both formerly peculiar to the New World, are among the most important products of West Africa. The staple of the Incas sustains Ireland.

There were, of course, foodstuff migrations throughout history. The diffusion of the great staples of early farming—as recounted in the previous chapter—presupposes ecological as well as cultural transmission. Human agency may have played a part in some accidental transmissions. The plant most prized for flavor in ancient Rome was silphium, a weed never successfully domesticated. It was exported from Cyrene, after introduction from its unique original homeland in nearby Libya, presumably by self-seeding. The natives, and the Greek gourmets for whom they harvested the plant, only nibbled the extremities, but the Romans ate the whole stem and root, sliced and
preserved in vinegar
. Overcropping to meet Roman demand doomed silphium to extinction. Its spread from Libya was the only recorded transmission of a food
plant in antiquity
. Others, however, can safely be presumed, including some plants, such as grapes, which advanced with the Roman frontier as far as the climate would allow, while Romans laboriously tried to re-create Mediterranean ecology in distant colonies. Alexanders, balm, balsam, coriander, dill, fennel, garden leek, garlic, hyssop, marjoram, mint, mustard, onion, opium poppy, parsley, rosemary, rue, sage, savory and thyme are all said to be “strong candidates” for Roman
introduction to Britain
. None of these, however, nor any subsequent transmissions within the Old World or within the New, can compare in importance in world historical terms with the exchanges that began with—or at about the time of—the voyages of Columbus. In part, this is because more recent ecological exchanges have occurred over unprecedented distances on an unprecedented scale. In part, too, it is because of the role of human agency in facilitating
and promoting them. Although there is room to debate the exact chronology and means of tradition of many of the plants in question—the sweet potato, for instance, may have crossed the Pacific on driftwoods without human involvement—it remains unquestionable that the great ocean-borne exchange of biota of the last five hundred years constituted the biggest human intervention in environmental history since the beginnings of species domestication.

On food, the effects of the exchange were most dramatic in the field of nutrition. The relatively sudden increase in the species available for exploitation in different parts of the world meant that the total nutritional value of the world's food production could leap ahead. Vast, previously unexploited or underexploited lands could be exploited for farming or ranching as suitable crops or livestock became transportable to new environments. The farmed frontier could climb up mountainsides and colonize deserts. Varied diets became accessible to populations previously overreliant on particular staples. Wherever the effects of the ecological exchange were felt, more people could be fed. This is not to say that the exchange of biota “caused” population to increase; but it facilitated it, by making it possible to feed more people. There were countercurrents: among the exchanged biota were not only foodstuffs but also people, who tend to be destructive, and disease-causing microbes, which inflicted terrible losses on populations unused to them. The arrival of Old World diseases, for instance, was the most important single reason for the collapse of the indigenous populations of much of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When Italian imperialists took cattle to feed their armies of conquest in Somalia in the 1880s, the rinderpest they brought with them killed millions of ruminants in East Africa and spread across the Zambezi to wipe out 90 percent of the grazing animals of Southern Africa and the people who
lived off them
. Nevertheless, in most places, to begin with—and, eventually, just about everywhere—the multiplication of foods fed the great demographic upturn of modern history.

There were also obvious political consequences. The people who controlled the routes of transmission could, to some extent, manipulate the consequences, shifting food production and concentrations of labor to wherever suited them. The maritime enterprises of modern times began as desperate efforts at self-elevation by poor, marginal, economically underdeveloped communities on Eurasia's Atlantic rim; but the perspectives opened up by their privileged access to the benefits of long-range ecological exchange helped the Spaniards, Portuguese, English and Dutch to become world-class imperialists—shifting, for instance, sugar
production to their American colonies or creating new spiceries under their own control The power of garnering plants and creatures from a dazzling variety of environments was a boost to Europe's incipient “scientific revolution.” Every courtly Wunderkammer became a repository of specimens for scrutiny and experiment. Nothing like this global range of knowledge had ever been available before. Privileged acquaintance with “plant and faunal occurrence and distribution constituted a first step towards an ability to determine the influence of man
on the environment
.” Though, as we shall see, China also benefited enormously from the introduction of New World crops, the worldwide ecological exchange made a major contribution to the long-term shift in the world balance of knowledge and power, as it tilted increasingly toward the West.

The political and demographic revolutions are obviously the most important results but the most vivid evidence of the effects of ecological exchange abide in the taste and colors of what people actually eat. The cooking of Italy is so intensely colored by the tomato that it is hard to imagine what it was like before that fruit arrived. The Italian tricolor represents the colors of the national flag with slices of tomato, mozzarella and avocado. Mozzarella is the cheese of an indigenous variety of water buffalo. Avocados and tomatoes, however, were fruits Italy got from America. The avocado's name derived from the Nahuatl word
ahuacatl,
meaning testicle
. Equally indispensable items on the Italian menu—gnocchi and polenta—are made from potatoes and maize respectively. Many ingredients now deeply imbedded in other “national” cuisines of European, African and Asian countries were similarly unknown in their present homelands until the Columbian Exchange. It is difficult to guess what the nutritional histories or menus of Ireland or the North European plain might have been without the potato. Is it possible to reimagine the tastes of India or Thailand or Szechuan without chilies, a source of palatal fire unknown outside the Americas before Columbus? What would the shop windows of European confectioners look like without chocolate? Or is the cuisine of the Malay world imaginable without peanuts for satay? Crème anglaise relies on the taste of the originally American aromatic, vanilla. Liberian foo-foo is made not with native millet but with the cassava which the freed slaves who founded the nation brought with them from America. On English menus, the word “Hawaiian” should be read as a warning that the dish in question, whatever it is, will come garnished with pineapple, but pineapple has a relatively short history in Hawaii: it was one of the more spectacular finds reported by Columbus from the Caribbean during his first transatlantic voyage as the most delicious fruit in the world. Jerusalem artichokes, discovered by Champlain in Canada in 1603, are now prized in France, but neglected in North America. The working-class
English Christmas has come to count on the turkey, which, despite its misleading English name, was once an exclusively New World delicacy» Indeed, at the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, eight thousand turkeys were sold every five days in the market of Tepeyácac; one hundred were eaten daily at the court of Texcoco; five hundred daily were fed
to Montezuma's zoo
. It is “impossible to imagine a Bengali meal without potatoes, tomatoes and chillies”: indeed, Bengali consumption of potatoes per head of population is exceeded only by that of
the Irish
. The provenance of the chilies on which it relies for flavor, and the identity of the carriers who took them from America to India, are encoded in the name Vindaloo, which is universally known as that of strong curry. It was originally a loan term from Portuguese, “Vinho e alhos” (literally, “wine and garlic” and, by extension, meats cooked in such a sauce). By a further quirk of global history, it has been adopted by the English as a sort of national dish and, during the soccer World Cup competition of 1998, was the title of a patriotic supporters' song.