An Edible History of Humanity

by Tom Standage

  As European explorers, colonists, botanists, and traders sought out new plants, learned how to nurture them, and worked out where else in the world they might also thrive, they reshaped the world’s ecosystems. The “Columbian Exchange” of food crops between the Old and New worlds, in which wheat, sugar, rice, and bananas moved west and maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and chocolate moved east (to list just a handful of examples in each direction), was a big part of the story, but not the only part; Europeans also moved crops around within the Old and New worlds, transplanting Arabian coffee and Indian pepper to Indonesia, for example, and South American potatoes to North America. Of course, crops had always migrated from one place to another, but never with such speed, on such a scale, or over such large distances. The post-Columbian stirring of the global food pot amounted to the most significant reordering of the natural environment by mankind since the adoption of agriculture. New foods from foreign lands slotted into previously underexploited ecological niches, increasing the food supply in many cases. This was true of potatoes and maize in parts of Eurasia, peanuts in Africa and India, and bananas in the Caribbean, for example. Sometimes new crops were hardier than local ones: Sweet potatoes from the Americas caught on in Japan because they could survive the typhoons that occasionally destroyed the rice crop, and cassava, also from the Americas, was adopted in Africa after being found to be resistant to locusts, since its edible roots remain safely out of reach underground.

  Despite the botanists’ nationalist ambitions, attempts to monopolize new plants generally did not last long. Making money from sugar, for example, depended on having colonial possessions with the right climate, and that depended chiefly on military rather than botanical might. Even so, one European nation emerged as the winner of this colonial contest, though its victory took an entirely unexpected form. The exchange and redistribution of food crops remade the world, and in particular those parts of it around the Atlantic Ocean, in two stages. First, new foods and new trading patterns redefined the demographics of the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Having done so, they then contributed to Britain’s emergence as the first industrialized nation. Had he known this in 1675, Charles II would no doubt have been proud, though he might have been disappointed to hear that the pineapple was not one of the many foods that would play a part in this tale. Instead, the two foods that are central to the story are sugar, which traveled west across the Atlantic, and the potato, which traveled in the opposite direction.

  COLUMBUS AND HIS EXCHANGE

  The Columbian Exchange, as the historian Alfred Crosby has called it, was aptly named because it really did start with Christopher Columbus himself. Although many other people carried plants, animals, people, diseases, and ideas between the Old and New worlds in the years to follow, Columbus was directly responsible for two of the earliest and most important exchanges of food crops with the Americas. On November 2, 1492, having arrived at the island of Cuba, he sent two of his men, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, into the interior with two local guides. Columbus believed that Cuba was part of the Asian mainland, and he expected his men to find a large city where they could make contact with the emperor. Torres spoke a little Arabic, which would, it was assumed, be understood by the emperor’s representatives. After four days the men returned, having failed to find either city or emperor. But they had, Columbus recorded, seen many fields of “a grain like millet that the Indians call maize. This grain has a very good taste when cooked, either roasted or ground and made into a gruel.” This was the first time that Europeans had encountered maize, and Columbus probably took some back to Spain with him when he returned from his first voyage, in 1493; he certainly took back maize from his second expedition the following year.

  Though maize was initially regarded as a botanical curiosity by European scholars, it soon became apparent that it was well suited to the southern Mediterranean climate and was, in fact, an extremely valuable crop. By the 1520s it had established itself in several parts of Spain and northern Portugal, and it soon afterward spread around the Mediterranean, into central Europe, and down the west coast of Africa. So rapid was the spread of maize around the world that its origins became obscured almost immediately. In Europe, it was variously known as Spanish corn, Indian corn, Guinea corn, and Turkey wheat, reflecting confusion about its provenance. And the speed with which maize reached China—it probably arrived there in the 1530s, though the first definite Chinese reference to it was not until 1555—led some people to the erroneous conclusion that maize must have been present in Europe and Asia before Columbus. Maize spread so quickly because it had such desirable properties. It grew well in soil that was too wet for wheat and too dry for rice, so it provided extra food from marginal land where existing Eurasian staples could not be grown. It also had a short growing season and produced a higher yield, per unit of land and labor, than any other grain. And whereas wheat typically produced four to six times as much grain per measure of seed sown, the figure for maize was between one hundred and two hundred.

  If maize, the crop that Columbus took eastward, was a blessing, then sugarcane, the crop he took westward, was a curse. Having worked in his youth as a sugar buyer for Genoese merchants, Columbus was familiar with sugar cultivation. He realized that the new lands he had discovered were well suited to the production of this lucrative product, and he took sugarcane with him to Hispaniola on his second voyage to the Americas in 1493. If he could not find gold or spices, he could at least make sugar. Given the labor-intensive nature of its production, he would have to find sufficient manpower, of course. But Columbus had observed after his first voyage that “the Indians have no weapons and are quite naked . . . they need only to be given orders to be made to work, to sow, or to do anything useful.” In other words, he could put the locals to work as slaves.

  Sugar and slavery had gone together for centuries. Sugarcane is originally from the Pacific islands, was encountered in India by the ancient Greeks, and was introduced to Europe by the Arabs, who began cultivating it on a large scale in the Mediterranean in the twelfth century using slaves from East Africa. Europeans acquired a taste for sugar during the Crusades and captured many of the Arab sugar plantations, which they manned with Syrian and Arab slaves. The slave-based production system was then transplanted to the Atlantic island of Madeira in the 1420s after its discovery by the Portuguese. During the 1440s the Portuguese increased sugar production by bringing in large numbers of black slaves from their new trading posts on the west coast of Africa. At first these slaves were kidnapped, but the Portuguese soon agreed to buy them, in return for European goods, from African slave-traders. By 1460 Madeira had become the world’s largest sugar producer, and no wonder: It had an ideal climate for sugar, was close to the supply of slaves, and was on the edge of the known world, so that the brutal realities of sugar production were kept conveniently out of sight of the growing throng of Euro-pe an consumers. The Spanish, for their part, began making sugar on the nearby Canary Islands, again using slaves from Africa.

  This proved to be merely the warm-up for what was to come in the New World. It was not until 1503 that the first sugar mill opened on Hispaniola. The Portuguese began production in Brazil around the same time, and the British, French, and Dutch established sugar plantations in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century. After attempts to enslave local people failed, chiefly because they succumbed to Old World diseases to which they had no immunity, the colonists began importing slaves directly from Africa. And so began the Atlantic slave trade. Over the course of four centuries, around eleven million slaves were transported from Africa to the New World, though this figure understates the full scale of the suffering, because as many as half of the slaves captured in the African interior died on the way to the coast. The vast majority of the slaves shipped across the Atlantic—around three quarters of them—were put to work making sugar, which became one of the main commodities in Atlantic trade.

  This trade developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries and ended up consisting of two overlapping triangles. In the first, commodities from the Americas, chief among them sugar, were shipped to Eu rope; finished goods, chiefly textiles, were shipped to Africa and used to purchase slaves; and those slaves were then shipped to the sugar plantations in the New World. The second triangle also depended on sugar. Molasses, the thick syrup left over from sugar production, was taken from the sugar islands to England’s North American colonies, where it was distilled into rum. This rum was then shipped to Africa where, along with textiles, it was used as currency to buy slaves. The slaves were then sent to the Caribbean to make more sugar. And so on.

  Having been an expensive luxury item at the time of the Crusades, sugar fell in price as production increased, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had become an everyday item for many Europeans. Demand grew as the exotic new drinks of tea, coffee, and cocoa (from China, Arabia, and the Americas, respectively) became popular in Europe, invariably sweetened with sugar. Having used fruit and honey as sweeteners for centuries, European consumers suddenly became accustomed to sugar, even addicted to it. The demand enriched Caribbean sugar barons, European merchants, and North American colonists. Rum became the most profitable manufactured item produced in New England, and by the early eighteenth century it accounted for 80 percent of exports. Attempts by the British government to restrict imports to New England of cheap molasses from the French sugar islands, in the form of the Sugar and Molasses Act of 1733 and the Sugar Act of 1764, were deeply unpopular with the colonists, causing the first of many disagreements and protests that ultimately led to the Declaration of Independence.

  As well as being notable for its reliance on slavery and its economic importance, sugar production also crystallized a new model of industrial organization. Making sugar involved a series of processes: cutting the sugarcane, pressing it to extract the juice, boiling and skimming the juice, and then cooling it to allow the crystals of sugar to form, while the leftover molasses was distilled into rum. The desire to do all of this on a large scale, as quickly and efficiently as possible, led to the development of increasingly elaborate machinery and prompted the division of workers into teams that specialized in separate parts of the process.

  In particular, sugar production depended on the use of rolling mills to press the cane. These could extract juice more efficiently than the old-fashioned methods of chopping up the stalks by hand and pounding it, or using screw presses. Rolling mills were also better suited to continuous production: Once pressed, the stalks could be used as fuel for the boilers in the next stage of the process. The machinery developed to process sugar—powered by wind, water, or animal power—was the most elaborate and costly industrial technology of its day, and it prefigured the equipment later used in the textile, steel, and paper industries.

  Operating the rolling mills, tending the boiling cauldrons of juice, and working the distilling equipment could be dangerous, however. A moment’s inattention when feeding sugar into the roller mill, or when handling the boiling sugar, could lead to horrific injuries or death. As one observer noted: “If a Boyler get any part into the scalding sugar, it sticks like Glew, or Birdlime, and ’tis hard to save either Limb or Life.” Nobody would do such dangerous and repetitive work at the low salaries planters were offering, which is why the planters relied on slave labor. To minimize the risk of accidents, it made sense for workers to specialize in particular tasks. Even for less dangerous work, such as the cultivation of the cane, planters found that dividing their slaves into teams and giving them specific tasks made it easier to supervise their work and coordinate the different stages of the process.

  An engraving showing proto-industrial sugar production in the West Indies.

  Establishing a sugar plantation required large capital investments to pay for land, buildings, machinery, and slaves. The resulting plantations were the largest privately owned businesses of their day, making their owners (who could expect annual profits of around 10 percent of capital invested) among the wealthiest men of the time. It has been suggested that profits from the sugar and slave trades provided the bulk of the working capital needed for Britain’s subsequent industrialization. In fact, there is little evidence that this was the case. But the idea of organizing manufacturing as a continuous, production-line process, with powered, labor-saving machinery and workers specializing in particular tasks, does owe a clear debt to the sugar industry of the West Indies, where this arrangement first emerged on a large scale.

  “LET THEM EAT POTATOES”

  When Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France, heard that the peasants had no bread to eat, she is supposed to have declared, “Let them eat cake.” In one version of the story, she said this when the starving poor clamored at her palace gates; in another, the queen made the remark while riding through Paris in her carriage and noting how ill-fed the people were. Or perhaps she said it when hungry mobs stormed the bakeries of Paris in 1775 and almost caused the postponement of the coronation of her husband, Louis XVI. In fact, she probably never said it at all. It is just one of many myths associated with the infamous queen, who was accused of all kinds of excess and debauchery by her political opponents in the run-up to the French Revolution in 1789. But the phrase encapsulates the perception of Marie-Antoinette as someone who professed to care about the starving poor but was utterly incapable of understanding their troubles. Even if she never advocated the substitution of cake for bread, however, she did publicly endorse another foodstuff as a means of feeding the poor: the potato. She probably did not say “Let them eat potatoes” either, but that is what she and many other people thought. And it was not such a bad idea. In the late eighteenth century, potatoes were belatedly being hailed as a wonder food from the New World.

  Europeans had first learned of potatoes in the 1530s, when the Spanish conquistadores embarked upon the conquest of the Inca Empire, which stretched right down the west coast of the South American continent. Potatoes were a mainstay of the Inca diet, alongside maize and beans. Originally domesticated in the region of Lake Titicaca, they then spread throughout the Andes and beyond. The Incas developed hundreds of varieties, each suited to a different combination of sun, soil, and moisture. But the value of potatoes was lost on the Eu rope ans who first encountered them. The earliest written description, dating from 1537, describes them as “spherical roots which are sown and produce a stem with its branches and flowers, although few, of a soft purple color; and to the root of this same plant . . . they are attached under the earth, and are the size of an egg more or less, some round and some elongated; they are white and purple and yellow, floury roots of good flavor, a delicacy to the Indians and a dainty dish even for the Spaniards.” Although a few potatoes were sent back to Spain, and spread from there to Europe’s botanical gardens, they were not seized upon as a valuable new crop in the way that maize had been. By 1600 potatoes were being cultivated on a small scale in a few parts of Europe, since the Spanish had introduced them to their possessions in Italy and the Low Countries. In 1601 Clusius, a botanist in Leyden, described the potato and gave it the scientific name Solanum tuberosum. He noted that he had received specimens in 1588 and that potatoes were grown in Italy for consumption by both humans and animals.

  Why did potatoes not prove more popular? After all, in the sandy soil of northern Europe they would eventually prove to be capable of producing two to four times as many calories per acre as had previously been possible with wheat, rye, or oats. Potatoes take only three to four months to mature, against ten for cereal grains, and can be grown on almost any kind of soil. One problem was that the first potatoes brought over from the Americas were adapted to growing in the Andes, where the length of the day does not vary much during the year. In Eu rope, where the length of the day varies far more, they initially produced a rather meager crop, and it took botanists a few years to breed new varieties that were well suited to the European climate.

  But even then, Europeans were suspicious of this new vegetable. Unlike maiz
e, which was recognizable as a previously unknown cousin of wheat and other cereal grains, potatoes were unfamiliar and alien. They were not mentioned in the Bible, which suggested that God had not meant men to eat them, said some clergymen. Their unaesthetic, misshaped appearance also put people off. To herbalists who believed that the appearance of a plant was an indication of the diseases it could cause or cure, potatoes resembled a leper’s gnarled hands, and the idea that they caused leprosy became widespread. According to the second edition of John Gerard’s Herball, published in 1633, “the Burgundians are forbidden to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that the eating of them causes leprosy.” More scientifically inclined botanists took an interest in potatoes, the first known edible tubers, and identified them as members of the poisonous nightshade family. That did not help their reputation either: Potatoes came to be associated with witchcraft and devil worship.