The Time of Food : Columbus and the Global Melting Pot

Imagine spaghetti without tomato sauce, Hungarian goulash without paprika. Even worse, consider a world without chocolate cake or a cheeseburger without fries.

Such would be the dire straits of the culinary world if the Old World explorers had never encountered the Americas. No matter what you may think of Columbus--whether you laud his courage or deplore his voyages--there is at least one result in which virtually all cultures of the world can take daily delight.

“The best thing that came out of Columbus is that we all eat better,” says Carolyn Margolis, assistant director of Quincentenary programs for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. The Europeans didn’t have chocolate or vanilla and they didn’t have potatoes. “The natives in America didn’t have cheese or milk,” Margolis says. “Chile peppers had never been eaten by Europeans before. Suddenly Hungarians had paprika.

“I don’t think you can sit down to the table today and have a meal that’s not the result of these two worlds coming together,” she continues. “Everybody got a new diet from it--a more interesting diet out of it. There was not a cuisine in the world that was not affected.”

That is one of the chief points Margolis and her colleagues strive to make in the “Seeds of Change” exhibit at the museum. Running until April, 1993, the $2.8-million exhibit is the museum’s largest temporary show ever.

A week before the exhibit opened, the Smithsonian held a two-day symposium “Good as Gold,” where a number of well-known culinary historians and writers discussed the foods the Americas gave the world.

To the food world, says Michael Batterberry, founding editor and associate publisher of Food Arts magazine and one of the panelists at the seminar, “It is a key moment, just as the Bicentennial was.”

“The Bicentennial made people focus on American roots, and that extended to American foods--regional foods that had always had second-class citizenship in restaurants, at least in the public’s mind,” Batterberry says. “Now we’re onto the same sort of thing, looking at the food of this hemisphere. The amount of literature that the quincentennial is engendering is going to make people think about the foods of the Americas in a more concerted way.”

What’s more, notes Batterberry, the culinary festivities “are very timely, because these foods dovetail with a lot of the nutritional guidelines (offered) in recent months and years. A lot of these foods are grains, beans and legumes; protein plays a less dominant role than it does in a meat-and-potatoes society.”

Until recently, when it came to studying the impact of Columbus’s trips, most attention was centered on the gold and silver that the Spanish government gained. But that was not what made Spain so powerful, says historian William H. McNeill in the book “Seeds of Change” (Smithsonian Institution Press: 1991, $39.95), which accompanies the exhibit.

Instead, says McNeill, it was “a change that historians have often overlooked: the spread of American food crops to Europe, Asia and Africa. These crops included maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, manioc, cacao, as well as various kinds of peppers, beans and squashes. All of them were totally unknown outside of the Americas before the time of Columbus.”

McNeill points out that, together with rice and wheat, potatoes and corn are the four chief staples of the human diet. That’s why potatoes and corn were chosen as two of the five seeds highlighted in the Smithsonian exhibit. (Tomatoes and tobacco were runners-up.)

The other three “seeds” of the exhibit were ones that came from Europe and forever changed the Americas: disease, the horse and sugar.

Together, these three seeds nearly annihilated the indigenous peoples, Margolis says. “It was, for the most part, not anything anyone did purposely. But it’s what happens when two isolated groups come in contact.”

Without potatoes and corn, writes McNeill, “The labor force that sustained Europe’s intensified urban activities . . . could not have been fed. The flood of emigrants who peopled the Americas and other lands overseas could not have survived infancy without the extra calories that came from potatoes and maize.”

Today, corn and the potato are integral parts of the European and Asian diets. No wonder, then, that the entrance to the exhibit features corn--14,000 ears of it, to be precise--in the colorful, 42-foot-high, Spanish-style doorway.

Later on, two dioramas of Native Americans portray the legacy of corn and potatoes in the New World. These are surrounded by artifacts, both old and new, signifying the major contribution these two crops have made to the American societies.

It is in the “Treasure Room,” however, where the significance of the New World’s food becomes clear. In the center of this plushly carpeted room, gold and silver pre-Columbian objects are on display.

“These are objects of craftsmanship,” Margolis says. “While they are beautiful, they did not have as much of a lasting impact as the New World foods. One year’s crop of potatoes is worth more than all the gold and silver the Spanish took out of the New World.

“So these,” she says, pointing to the early engravings of peppers, vanilla, watermelon, squash, cacao, tomatoes and sweet potatoes hung neatly around the gold and silver, “are the true treasures of the New World.”