Comments on: Leap frogging the Pacific: Chocolate and the Acapulco Galleon

By: Diana Buja

Diana Buja — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:28:35 +0000

Rachel, don’t know of Dong Yen’s book but will search for it.

On dispersal of food plants, I do agree – and also that unless locally suitable, folks just don’t ‘buy in’ – a fundamental aspect of agricultural R&D that many simply haven’t yet cottoned onto. Points that I want to do some blogging about in the future…

As for the Kindle – it is great for Africa! So many books can be downloaded and put on it, and read separate from a computer or hard copy.

Look forward to haring what you have to say about the Columbian Exchange.

By: Rachel Laudan

Rachel Laudan — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:57:21 +0000

Huge thing. Must post on why the Columbian Exchange Wasn’t.

By: Adam Balic

Adam Balic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:49:59 +0000

Such a small thing really with bit effects. Imagine the food history of Europe and Africa if the technology had been brought across. No pellagra and likely a large increase in population.

By: Rachel Laudan

Rachel Laudan — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:15:27 +0000

In general absolutely not. The only equivalent would be atole, wet ground but usually notnixtamalized maize, which makes a thick drink/soup. Very popular in these cold mornings and evenings. But the complex techniques for maize have never left the Americas.

By: Adam Balic

Adam Balic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:49:26 +0000

Is maize in Mexico ever eaten as a mush? Seems to be the major way it is consumed outwith Mexico.

By: Rachel Laudan

Rachel Laudan — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:24:37 +0000

I didn’t know that one though I have a couple of others on my shelves. Off to download it now to my computer. Is the kindle worth it to you?

By: Rachel Laudan

Rachel Laudan — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:23:35 +0000

Do you know Doug Yen’s book on the sweet potato. We know so little about the dispersal of food plants. But what always strikes me is that even when food plants were dispersed, unless native users went with them, the techniques for exploiting the plants were left behind (maize, nopales).

By: Diana Buja

Diana Buja — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:43:10 +0000

Food movements across oceans and continents really are extraordinary.

Your blog reminds me of a little book that I have downloaded to my Kindle (the only one in Burundi!!) about chocolate, written in 1652, which you may already know about. A great read:

Chocolate: or, An Indian Drinke
By the wise and Moderate use whereof, Health is preserved, Sicknesse Diverted, and Cured, especially the Plague of the Guts; vulgarly called The New Disease; Fluxes, Consumptions, & Coughs of the Lungs, with sundry other desperate Diseases. By it also, Conception is Caused, the Birth Hastened and facilitated, Beauty Gain’d and continued.
Written Originally in Spanish, by Antonio Colmenero
of Ledesma, Doctor in Physicke, and faithfully rendred in the English,
By Capt. James Wadsworth.

LONDON,
Printed by J. G. for Iohn Dakins, dwelling
neare the Vine Taverne in Holborne,
where this Tract, together with the
Chocolate it selfe, may be had at
reasonable rates. 1652

Url =
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21271/21271-h/21271-h.htm

By: Adam Balic

Adam Balic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:23:11 +0000

It is quite extraordinary how far and wide the Portuguese went at this early period and how much New World food items that they spread about Globe. At the end of the 16th century Van Linschoten (who also descibes the Indian curry in English for the first time) says that the Pineapple is “one of the best fruites, and of the best taste in all India”. By the middle of the 17th century the very first European book on the native flora of China describes the pineapple under cultivation.

I hope one day that the question to how that Sweet Potato of the New World was transported throughout the Pacific in the Pre-Columbian period.