Visited a friend at rehab last night and the therapist, (middle eastern) began asking questions about farming. She asked about how and when things are planted. She then remarked about how she learned that Native Americans taught the settlers how to grow vegetables for Thanksgiving.
My question is, were there no vegetables in England prior to the 1500s?
Many of the first world settlers weren't exactly the type of people most suited to frontier life. Many were town/city people fleeing persecution, hired labor, indentured servants, rich sponsors, etc. Not a wealth of knowledge on how to survive in a foreign environment.
Corn refers to barley, rye, wheat- what we call corn is properly maize. Most of the foods we eat are American in origin, tomato, potato, beans, maize, sweet potato, peanuts, peppers, avocados, cranberries, black raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, elderberries, huckleberries, papayas, pawpaws, passionfruit, pineapples, red raspberries, strawberries, squashes and more were unknown in the old world. iirc they did have beets, turnips and onions.
Crops native to the americas are tomatoes, "irish" potatoes, corn/maize, true squashes/pumpkins, butter/lima beans, common bush/pole beans, chilis/peppers of all types, tobacco and peanuts.
Many others that we eat today were "available" to Europe but we're either not adopted yet or developed to current status. For instance both field peas and okra as well as true yams were in Africa as were watermelons. Only watermelons had mad their way to Europe. Field peas and okra came through the americas as part of the slave trade prior to going to Europe.
Strangly though many new world crops were already in Europe, via Spain, prior to the English colonization of North America. Yet in the century plus between Columbus and Jamestown few if any had gained widespread use.
1 chiefly dialectal : a small hard particle : grain 2 : a small hard seed —usually used in combination peppercornbarleycorn 3 British : the grain of a cereal grass that is the primary crop of a region (such as wheat in Britain and oats in Scotland and Ireland) also : a plant that produces corn
Hogs also ate several root type crops and other food waste in addition to the small grains and brassica type plants. Cattle ate those as well, but were mostly grass fed. Eastern Native Americans did not have horses or livestock. Small cool season grains were well adapted to the northern, moist, cooler eastern region.
I’m good with it. Just curious what they ate at the theatre in London. Lol
You probably don't want to know, lol.
Yeah...that aged goose sounds delightful. By aged it meant that you had hung it by the necj till the body fell away, then it was "ready" to eat. British food is so fun.
Turkeys were domesticated in the new world, along with alpacas llamas. Agriculture provides a more stable food supply but also more labor. In the old world bread was and is the staff of life, wheat comes from the Middle East. The new world also gave us syphilis, thanks for the blankets!
[quote=tomahawker]Turkeys were domesticated in the new world, along with alpacas llamas. Agriculture provides a more stable food supply but also more labor. In the old world bread was and is the staff of life, wheat comes from the Middle East. The new world also gave us syphilis, thanks for the blankets![/quote]
You don't get that from blankets. It's what you do in the blankets.
I really don't know what people in the old world used to eat before the discovery of America. No potatoes, beans, corn, squash; how did Europeans survive?
No Americans had horses prior to contact, like barleycorn horses were an EU product.
There were horses in North, Central and South America when the people whose descendants became Native American first arrived. They chose to eat the horses rather than domesticate them though. The archaeological evidence appears to show that they ate horses and many other large mammals into extinction. There were probably some climate changes that helped with the extinctions of most of the large mammals.
I like this thread.. wish there was some sort of plant history class I could take.. Ethnobotany is the closest thing I can imagine having this info.. too bad I hadn't taken the pre-req.
[quote=tomahawker]Turkeys were domesticated in the new world, along with alpacas llamas. Agriculture provides a more stable food supply but also more labor. In the old world bread was and is the staff of life, wheat comes from the Middle East. The new world also gave us syphilis, thanks for the blankets![/quote]
You don't get that from blankets. It's what you do in the blankets.
Charlie
Sarcasm- in return for the smallpox blankets they gave us syphilis. Keep up Charlie
