Why We Eat What We Eat: How Columbus Changed the Way the World Eats

by Raymond Sokolov

Book Overview

Raymond Sokolov, the Leisure & Arts Editor of The Wall Street Journal describes how Christopher Columbus changed the way the world eats in Why We Eat What We Eat.

Sokolov says that Columbus greatly influenced our eating habits when such New World delights as tomatoes, chocolate, green beans, chili peppers, and maize were introduced into cuisine throughout the world and when the delicacies of the Old World found their way...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671797913
• ISBN13: 9780671797911
• Release Date: April 1993
• Publisher: Atria Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Cuisine for the Mind

One cannot help but be impressed by the prodigious research that preceeded this book. As in his other works, the author travels at a steady pace, casually informing and experiencing and reporting as he goes.The premise offered here is quite revolutionary: Namely, that it was Spain, through its colonization in the New World and particularly Mexico, initiated a culinary melting pot that has been bubbling ever faster since Columbus's voyages. At first, the idea sounds preposterous but the evidence is overwhelming. He shows that many "African" foods were orginially New World foods, that the chili we associate with Thai, Indian and Korean cooking had its origins in colonial Mexico. The latter also provided chocolate, corn, the tomato, various fruits and another colony (Peru) gave us the potato. He goes on to demonstrate that French, Italian, Spanish, German and the other national European cuisines are rather recent inventions. The tomato plays an exceptionally large role in the world of food and this despite the tirades and "scientific" arguments against it well into the 19th century. Spanish food affected South America which affected Africa. Some foods, paprika for example, traveled a circuitous route - from Brazil to Iran to the Arab lands to Europe. Thus, the underbelly of Europe - Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia - to this day use the stuff in huge amounts.Final chapters covered "American" food, what the term really meant and what our future portends. Especially endearing were the tales of lonely innovators, scientists, industrialists and plain folk who - through sheer ingenuity and curiousity - added to the pleasure of mankind.

Food History Detective

Sokolov does a splenid job of tracking down the world cuisines and how they came to be what they are today.The event that backed most of today's eating habits was the world exploration and development by the Portuguese and Spaniards. From Mexico to the Americas, from South America to Mexico and the Caribbean, they served as the carriers of exotic foodstuffs to the far corners of the earth and then back again.Potato to tomato, chocolate to manioc, the gourmet ingredients are traced out from their roots to adaptation.Nouvelle cuisine and american regional cooking are essayed as to their development.Great reading to shed light on how Chinese had originally no hot spices to why Italians had no pasta.Enlightening and entertaining for the interested reader.

Much food for thought

It is a shame that this book has been let go out of print. Someone ought to get to Penguin or Dover and ask them to bring it back to availability. The text is fascinating, and, rather like good science fiction, makes you stop and rethink your assumptions about "the way things are." Our assumptions that the food on today's tables and menus has always been much the same are fascinatingly wrong. The authors treats several places in both the "new" and "old" worlds as to the effect of ingredients imported after 1492, and then looks in more detail at several of the seminal products, such as corn and potatoes. Particularly if you like "ethnic" cuisine, you will never look at a recipe or menu in the same way again.

very readable, entertaining and authoritative

This is a very readable and entertaining history of the revolution in cuisine with the introduction of foods from the New World. It includes some marginal political history necessary to understand the subject, but is filled with interesting anecdotes. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the evolution of cuisine or just a good read.