Hacker News Reader

> For example, one thing I always think about when cooking is how popular tomatoes and potatoes are in Indian cuisine (the former being essentially mandatory in most dishes), but since they were both brought over from the New World, the food from just 400 years ago would've been extremely different from what it is today.

Tomatoes in Italian cuisine are even more recent. While they were theoretically available from the 16th century, Europeans believed they were poisonous and refused to eat them. It was only around the mid-end of the 19th century that they became a popular and accepted part of the cuisine.

Yes, tomatoes and potatoes were considered toxic for a long time, because they belong to the same family as a bunch of very toxic plants (such as the belladona), and even with tomatoes and potatoes, most parts of the plants are toxic anyway (anything except the parts we eat, actually).

Yes, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, and corn to some extant, are an important part of French food in many regions of the country, and yet all of these went from America. And yet I'm pretty sure most people imagine this is what peasants used to eat back in the middle ages. Indeed, all our "traditional" meals are actually a pretty recent invention.

> tomatoes and potatoes ... were both brought over from the New World

Likewise hot chilis peppers.

And the Avocado, which hasn't had quite the same impact.