this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Italians: we are the masters of tomatoes
Swiss: we invented chocolate
My Aztec ass:
Potatoes, tomatoes, cocoa, coffee, pasta, peppers, tea, nearly every form of cooking spice; all this shit that Europeans and North Americans claim as culinary cultural heritage are actually ideas that were taken/repurposed from another country/culture/region.
But that's okay, just dont be a racist bigot about it, is all.
Peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes have basically spread everywhere at this point. Most Asian and African cultures have readily incorporated those into their own food traditions to where it's hard to imagine how those cuisines were like before crop exchange with the New World.
Sugar!
Before Europeans discovered the sugarcane they only had the natural sweetness of things to make sweet food, the sweetest of which is sugar beet, whose sugar is lot harder to purify than that of sugar cane.
How sweet can cake be without some reasonably pure form of sugar you can add. Did the concept of cake even exist in Europe before that?
Edit: nevermind - I forgot the sweetness of fruit (oops).
Honey?
Yeah, I really missed pretty much the entire domain of sweet things.
Most sugar is made from beets nowadays in Europe.
Most sugar consumed in Europe is from sugarcane.
Most sugar produced in Europe is from sugarbeets, but that production is still less than the imported sugar from sugarcane (because sugarcane is just vastly more productive).
They didn't extract sugar from sugar beet back in the 14th century. In fact only in 1747 was it discovered that beets had sucrose and sugar beets themselves were only created after that, via selective breeding, so I don't think they had sugar as we know it back then. However as somebody else pointed out, they had honey which has a very high concentration of sugar.
I suspected sugar wasn't extracted from sugar beet in the Middle Ages or earlier but I wasn't sure and prompted by your question I went searching for it and indeed that is the case since sugar beets didn't even exist back then.
So Europeans ate nothing got it.
Garlic, pickles, and liquor are old world
Europeans aren't native to Europe either.
You could argue that there are no native people or orginal cultures besides the once in east Africa. Everything else evolved form there.
m'corn
In Illinois, it's pronounced "mm,corn" and used in a gruff but familiar manner in lieu of say, discussing the weather rhetorically. Instead of, out of the blue, "mm,brisk", or "mm,hmm", "mm,rainsdue"; this would suffice to imply "I'm new in town and have learned your ways, but let's not get too friendly". 🤌🏼