Northern Europeans planted peas and oats that had come along with the expansion of the Roman Empire. East Africans ate mangos and eggplants carried by Persian voyagers. And across the Atlantic, North American Indians farmed corn, beans, and squash which had been domesticated thousands of miles to the south. Although many food plants had traveled halfway around the globe by 1492, not one food crop had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Today, tomatoes are a basic food in the Mediterranean, as chili peppers are in many parts of Asia.
Pineapples flourish in the Pacific, while avocados thrive in Kenya and Israel.
In Egypt, street vendors sell roasted ears of corn and sweet potatoes are snack foods in Japan. Explorers and colonizers from the Old World added to the New World cornucopia by bringing seeds and cuttings of familiar crops with them to the Americas. The wheat fields of Nebraska and Saskatchewan, the coffee plantations of Columbia and Costa Rica, the rice fields of Louisiana and Texas, the vineyards of California and Chile, and the orange groves of Florida and Mexico have their origins in the Old World. The activities in this section illustrate the Old World and New World origins of the foods we eat and the impact Columbus' voyages had on the diets, cuisines, and ethnic make-up of our world today. Send questions, comments, and corrections to the webmaster .