Concept:
- The claim can be tested by picking any everyday food and asking where it actually came from.
- In almost every case the answer lies in another continent, which is exactly the point the statement makes.
Step 1: Take a food that seems purely European.
Spaghetti is thought of as Italian, yet it is believed that noodles travelled west from China and became spaghetti, while another account says Arab traders carried pasta to Sicily in the fifth century.
A dish treated as national turns out to have arrived from abroad.
Step 2: Take a food that seems purely Indian.
Chillies and potatoes are central to Indian cooking today, yet neither was known here five centuries ago. Both came from America after the voyages of Columbus, along with maize, tomatoes, groundnuts, soya and sweet potatoes.
Step 3: Note how deep the effect went.
This was not a matter of taste alone. The potato allowed the poor of Europe to eat better and live longer, and the peasants of Ireland came to depend on it so completely that the crop disease of the 1840s killed hundreds of thousands of them.
Final Answer: Everyday foods carry the record of long distance exchange. Noodles moved from China to Europe as spaghetti, and potatoes, chillies, maize and tomatoes moved from America to Europe and Asia, reshaping what ordinary people ate.