If it fills bellies, it travels

July 11, 2024 1:49 AM

You cannot walk on water or raise the dead. But you can do something that Jesus never did: eat a banana. Or a tomato. Or a potato. Just walk into any supermarket on the planet to get either of those, or any of the other once-regional crops that have gone global since Golgotha. This map shows the various regions of origin for 151 of today’s staple food crops. It illustrates an astounding fact that has become so commonplace that we hardly ever give it a thought: just how “foreign” much of the food on our plates actually is. from Why Jesus Never Ate a Banana [Atlas Obscura]
posted by chavenet (10 comments total)

At one point I heard someone lament that you never see restaurants that advertise themselves as specializing in "Native American food" because at this point, ingredients like tomatoes, sweet corn, potatoes, peppers, and the like are all just kind of considered "normal" all around the world, and too many people think of them as just sort of having always been there (after all, there are multiple Asian countries whose cuisine is defined by their love for hot chili peppers, and nowadays people associate tomatoes more with Italy than not).

It does also feel weird that, in the US at least, fruits native to the continent like the pawpaw and the pitaya/dragonfruit and the cherimoya are pretty much all considered incredibly exotic, while fruits imported from Eurasia like apples and oranges are thought of as "normal."
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:12 AM on July 11 [5 favorites]

Previously.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 2:18 AM on July 11 [2 favorites]

I read Stones from the River in high school, and in it, a character is overwhelmed after years of deprivation in wartime Germany by a banana given to her by a foreign soldier, and it kind of floored me, changing how I looked at the world. It knocked loose some of my uninformed notions of the world, and made me curious about just how novel so much of what we consider traditional cuisine is. As doctorfedora mentions, without tomatoes, what does Italian food look like?

Past that, it made me interested in moments where someone encounters a new food for the first time. Personally, I didn't have Thai food until the age of thirty, and I immediately regretted those first flavorless thirty years. With the spread of food through globalization, it's fascinating to see a country like Japan and the visible effects of increased levels of protein in diets. My mother-in-law is sitting over on the sofa, with her legs sort of hanging over the floor. Mrs. Ghidorah is nearly a foot taller than her mother, born into a very different, more bountiful, and yes, more meat and protein heavy diet. Meanwhile, I'm teaching kids that, by high school, are towering over me.

For all the benefits, though, I do feel a loss of the novelty sometimes. It's not nearly as amazing as it should be to eat a banana. I don't know where I first saw a mango, but it definitely wasn't in 1980s Michigan. On the other hand, something in me feels like eating a mango shouldn't feel the same as finding the same chain stores in every city you visit, even recognizing that that kind of feeling leads to people arguing over who should be deprived of what just so they can feel like something is more special.

It is absurd, though, that you can more readily find fresh ingredients for Thai food in a supermarket in the Midwest than you can in one in Japan.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:30 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]

It's probably due to the fact that the middle eastern origins of Christianity got divorced very quickly as soon as it became part of imperial Rome + the transportation technology and trading relationships of the day, but I always find it interesting how there's one particular Muslim/islamicate cultural habit that never transferred even in Europe: the constant invocations to eat this or that food item as part of being inspired by our religious forefathers. Eg, even up to the Pacific you'll still get Muslims growing up with the habit of eating dates even if for generations most of them would never have seen a date tree. But they're abundant in the market.

Because certainly even the habit of having a lot of sugar is a cultural transfer into the European West. But I never really hear my Christian friends saying oh drink this or eat that, just like Jesus would have done.
posted by cendawanita at 3:56 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]

Also, from TFA: Those bananas Jesus never ate? They come from South Asia

Excuse you, that's a maritime Southeast Asia (even northeast Oceania) legacy.
posted by cendawanita at 4:06 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]

I found it interesting to learn that before the potato was introduced as a staple crop, Ireland was known for its dairy products. But the population was smaller. Before the blight, the potato allowed relatively small pieces of land to feed a family and the population grew. Cheese, milk and butter are still ubiquitous Irish foods, but not nearly as much as the potato.
posted by plonkee at 4:21 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]

But I never really hear my Christian friends saying oh drink this or eat that,

It’s true, Christianity commemorates its most important meal by eating the host.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:37 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]

At one point I heard someone lament that you never see restaurants that advertise themselves as specializing in "Native American food"

You might want to check out these two previouslies:

one

two
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:41 AM on July 11 [2 favorites]

The ubiquitousness really is recent. Until 1990, Poland got citrus fruit and bananas once a year - when the ship (singular) from Cuba arrived around Christmas. Hell, orange juice from concentrate was exotic and a treat for children. In 30 years we've gone from that to a national habit of inhaling tangerines by the kilo...
posted by I claim sanctuary at 4:51 AM on July 11

https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer

There's a lot of fruit that is very local, either because it doesn't ship well or because no one has tried to spread it or because no one knows how to grow it away from its habitat.

Behold a youtube channel from a man who is fascinated by trying new-to-him fruits. He wasn't doing well in the world until he started his channel and there turned out to be an audience.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:58 AM on July 11