135
CHAPTER
14
THE COLUMBIAN
EXCHANGE AND THE
OLD WORLDS
And the trees are as different from ours as day from night; and
also the fruits, and grasses and stones and everything.
Christopher Columbus
1
EUROPE
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked the maximum exten-
sion of that episode of glacial expansion we call the Little Ice Age, when
growing seasons were shortened by several weeks and altitudes at which
crops could grow were reduced. At the same time Europeans, having
recovered from the devastation of the Black Plague, were once more
increasing in numbers and in need of extra calories. It was at this point
that the American foods, whose earlier adoptions had been scattered and
spasmodic, began to achieve widespread acceptance.
2
A good question is why it took Europeans so long to embrace the Amer-
ican crops.
3
They promised more calories and some, like maize and pota-
toes, had signifi cant advantages over Old World counterparts. Illustrative
are potatoes. In that swath from the North Sea to the Ural Mountains, rye,
although temperamental in the face of cold winters and rainy summers,
was the only Old World grain that did at all well. But potatoes thrived in
such a climate – very like their native environment – and could produce
136
A Movable Feast

crops.
7
Much of this tinkering was done by botanists who initially probed the
New World curiosities in the hope of discovering miraculous pharmaco-
logical properties and, outside of Spain, botanical gardens were the fi rst
European homes of the American plants. The botanists entered the new
plants in “Herbals,” whose woodcut engravings displayed them in detail
and, as the plants became more familiar, some were slowly, often reluc-
tantly, incorporated into diets.
Reluctantly, because of yet another problem – the conservatism of the
peasants whose job it was to plant the new crops. Why should they jettison
successful methods of cultivating familiar crops, passed from generation
to generation for a cycle of centuries, to accommodate new and strange
The Columbian Exchange and the Old Worlds
137
ones? And, for that matter, why should they eat foods to which they were
unaccustomed and that demanded new preparation methods? Weaning
the peasantry away from tried and true agricultural methods and tried and
true foods was perhaps just a matter of time; yet, in many cases, it was a
matter of a very long time.
In the decades following 1492, American foodstuffs entered Europe
through Spain and Portugal (a possession of Spain from 1580 to 1640),
where they were cultivated and then disseminated via two principal routes.
One was into the Mediterranean to Spain’s Italian holdings; the other was
north via Flanders, also a Spanish possession at the time. But many food
items such as peppers, maize, squash, and beans also reached southeastern
Europe in haphazard fashion via Portuguese Africa, India, and the Turkish
Empire.
8
Maize was found on all the larger islands of the Caribbean by Columbus

138
A Movable Feast
southern France, and later the Balkans – maize was adopted by the poor as
a food for humans, and, almost overnight it became their most important
one. The cereal had some real advantages, not the least of which was that it
could be propagated in peasant gardens, where it was tax exempt from both
the tithe and seigniorial dues. Moreover, cornmeal fi t easily enough into an
already existing diet based on pulmentum or mush (the Italian polenta, for
example), replacing more expensive millets or barley that could now be
grown for market instead of local consumption.
The adoption of maize, however, boosted populations beyond previous
limits, which created both a need for still more tillable land and a large
subsistence farmer class to work those fi elds in return for a small plot con-
ceded by landlords to grow that subsistence. As the diet concentrated ever
more narrowly on maize, niacin-containing animal foods were rarely con-
sumed and, without knowledge of the Native American method of treat-
ing maize with lime to release its niacin, pellagra became endemic. Those
who contracted its curious dermatological symptoms were “the butterfl y
people” who died in great numbers, or went slowly insane.
But in the long run maize was health-giving. It helped improve diets by
stimulating the inclusion of more high quality protein. Most Europeans
have never been all that enthusiastic about eating the vegetable, but eat
it happily enough after its transformation into beef, cheese, milk, chickens
and eggs. And as an animal feed, the cereal made it possible to carry more
barnyard animals through the winter which, in turn, meant more whole
protein on a year-round basis. Before maize, what little hay was cut went
to oxen, warhorses, and breeding stock, and the rest of the barnyard was
slaughtered every fall.
13
And fi nally, copious barn manure collected over the

slander and semantics.
The slander came at the hands of the Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhin,
who wrote in the last years of the sixteenth century that potatoes not
only aroused sexual desire but also caused wind and leprosy – the latter
a steep price to pay for an aphrodisiac. Moreover – and another diffi culty
for all of the American foods – in the eyes of religious fundamentalists, the
potato was probably guilty on all of these counts. After all, nowhere was it
mentioned in the Bible; hence it must be the work of the Devil. In fact, the
strange subterranean process by which it reproduced seemed especially
devilish. And fi nally, Bauhin sought to clinch his case by once more declar-
ing that the vegetable belonged to the notorious belladonna family and
was therefore poisonous, which was partially true, at least of the plant’s
leaves and fl owers.
18
Semantic confusion began when the Spaniards appropriated the Inca
name, papa for the white potato and the Caribbean Indian word batata
for the sweet potato.
19
Confusion was compounded because Columbus
had taken sweet potatoes to Spain from the Caribbean decades before
the white potato arrived from Peru. By the end of the sixteenth century,
the sweet potato had been designated Ipomoea batatas, whereas the white
potato was known as batatas hispanorum or the “Spanish potato” – this
appearance of science confounded as white potatoes reached England
from (as legend had it) Virginia with Francis Drake. He apparently had
acquired them at Cartagena instead, but a Virginia origin of potatoes was
given scientifi c blessing in the 1597 Herbal of John Gerard, who repeated
the legend. It appeared that the world had yet another potato – the “Virginia
potato,”
20

He put a fi eld of potatoes under armed guard until the plants were ready
for transplanting, then withdrew the guards for a night, knowing that the
peasants, now convinced that potatoes were valuable, would steal every
last one and transplant them at home.
22
Elsewhere, however, in Germany
and Russia, it required stern edicts, often enforced at gunpoint, to compel
a peasantry that believed bread to be the natural food of man to plant
potatoes even as a famine food.
23
And resistance, especially in Russia, con-
tinued well into the nineteenth century. This was some 200 years after the
peripatetic potato, which had journeyed from South America to Europe,
returned to the Americas – in this case to Boston – as the “Irish potato.”
24
Another American food that reached North America along a similarly
circuitous route was the tomato, although not all Europeans, by now total-
ly bewildered about where all the new foods were coming from, conced-
ed the tomato a New World origin. In the past, new foods had generally
reached Europe from the east or from the south across the Mediterranean.