Ripples from the Columbian Exchange

There is little doubt that the Columbian exchange was one of the greatest disruptions of food production and consumption across the world. The exchange resulted, amongst many other things, in the extensive growing of sugar-cane in the Americas. This encouraged the slave trade, with millions of Africans transported across the Atlantic, while the consumption of the resulting sugar led to the deaths of millions of people. Vast numbers of native Americans died as a result of diseases introduced by the domestic animalowning Europeans. Wheat from the Old World colonised the North American prairies displacing most of the roaming herds of bison. Potatoes and manioc from the Americas quickly became vital food crops in Europe and in Africa. All this is well-known (see, for example, Nunn and Qian, 2010; Boivin, Fuller and Crowther, 2012; Grennes, 2007). In general, food movements both of plants and animals, took place relatively quickly after 1492, especially when compared to earlier episodes of food globalisation, such as the Trans-Eurasian exchange which took place over several millennia (Boivin et al, 2012; Jones et al, 2016). This paper will consider whether evidence of ripples from the Columbian Exchange, can still be found today, in a world of increasingly globalised food consumption and production on both sides of the Atlantic. It might be assumed that the consumption of certain foodstuffs retains an element of resilience in their homeland: for instance, might nationalist gastronomic movements and ideologies promote elements of their own pre-Encounter diet? However, as we shall see, most food products, vegetable or animal, seem to be able to ‘globalise’ with considerable ease.