3!
by Kay
К.
Moss *
mve you ever thought about your
f dinner? I mean really thought
about where all of the food on
your plate comes from? Just like
you have grandparents and
great-grandparents, every food
has ancestors.
Ancient History
Way back before 1492, before the Old World
met the New World, your human ancestors'
dinners would have been different from
yours. Do you know what happened in 1492
that changed dinner? No matter where in the
world people lived then, they started to expe¬
rience new foods after explorer Christopher
Columbus sailed back to Europe from the
New World.
Before seeds and plants were exchanged
between the New World and the Old, there
were no tomatoes in Italy; no potatoes in
Europe; no corn or peanuts in Africa or Asia;
no chili peppers in India or Thailand; no
peaches, carrots, or broccoli in what we call
North Carolina; and no rice, bananas, or cane
sugar anywhere in the Americas. Imagine
that! For hundreds and hundreds of years,
travelers, explorers, and adventurers collected
seeds and plants from faraway places. Folks
moving to a new country packed seeds,
plants, and even farm animals. Transportation
was slow — by foot, boat, or animal power.
Slowly, over many years, food plants and ani¬
mals spread around the world as people
explored and settled new lands.
Prehistoric Snack at the Movies
When you go to the movies, you may eat pre¬
historic American foods; popcorn, peanuts, or
chocolate. People grew or ate these
foods somewhere in the Americas
before 1492. Peanuts began in
South America, were taken to
Africa by early European explor¬
ers, and traveled from Africa to
North America many years later.
Prehistoric people in tropical
Has Ancestors, Too
America enjoyed their chocolate unsweet¬
ened, instead of the sweet chocolate we love.
Sugarcane took hundreds of years to travel
halfway around the globe before finally get¬
ting to the New World.
Ancestors on Yonr Plate
Suppose you sit down to a delicious dinner of
turkey, corn, broccoli, and carrots, with
banana pudding for dessert. What a global
dinner plate! Let's trace the genealogies, or
where the foods came from.
Turkey and corn are native American foods
that the original North Carolinians ate, but
seeds for the first broccoli and carrots in
North Carolina came here with European set¬
tlers. Spanish or Portuguese explorers to
Central and South America brought bananas'
ancestors from Africa. Today we eat the
descendants of those bananas. Read the stick¬
ers on your bananas to find out where they
were grown.
Corn, the “Most Useful Grain*'
John Lawson — an Englishman who
explored the interior of the Carol inas in
1701 — wrote that "the Indian Corn, or
Maiz, proves the most useful Grain in
the World; and had it not been for the
Fruitfullness of this Species, it would
have proved very difficult to have set¬
tled some of the Plantations in
America." In most parts of the world,
the most ancient and basic dish is a
hot cereal made of whatever grain
grows best in that place. So, the
most historic North Carolina food
may be grits, or mush, made of
ground-up, dried corn. Mush has
other names — such as porridge, hasty'
pudding, or loblolly — in other places.
Even before the first Europeans and
Africans arrived in present-day North
Carolina, American Indians were grind¬
ing and cooking dried corn. The new¬
comers soon learned to eat this cornmeal
mush. During the decades of European
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* Kay
К.
Moss is adjunct curator for eighteenth-century hfeways studies at the Schiele Museum of Natural
History in Gastonia. She Iras authored Southern Folk Medicine: 1750-1820, Journey to the Piedmont Past,
and Decorative Motifs from the Southern Backcountry, and coauthored The Backcountry Housewife: A
Study of Eighteenth-Century Foods. She also wrote the activities for this issue.
Tff/f/, Spring 2007
