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Comment by torstenvl | Hacker News Reader

They never did. Tomatoes are 100% American. They do not grow natively in Italy or anywhere else in Europe.

I always found this to be extremely amusing, so much of our cultural food touchstones are less old than we think. Tempura for example, is originally Portuguese. Salmon was not used for sushi until pretty recently (needs to be flash frozen to be safe for this one). Japanese curry? From Britain! By way if India.

Biryani? Adapted from Persian cooking.

Ooo that’s a new one for me, awesome! Biryani is so good.

From India by way of Britain, right?

Yes sorry. That is the better way to say it.

By way of Britain is correct. British ‘curry’ is anything cooked with ‘curry powder’ which is an entirely British invention which is not used in India. It’s this curry powder from which Japanese and Korean curries are made.

I also did not know this! That is really interesting.

EUers mostly eat Tomatoes grown within a few hundred miles of EU borders. Not from America.

Morocco is the leading supplier to the EU, accounting for 70% of the EU's total imports, followed by Turkey.

He meant historically, tomatoes are native to South America before being brought everywhere else. So ie a Sicilian getting angry about not doing some red sauce pasta dish due to feeling this is their heritage original dish and they have patent on the proper procedure... it depends how far back in time you look.

Same ie potatoes in eastern Europe, a base in many many 'traditional' dishes. Yes if we look maybe 10 generations back, not so much for say 30 generations

Exactly. Use of red sauce in Italian cuisine is what, if it were invented today, we would call "Ibero-Italian fusion cuisine"; and the Spanish and Portuguese red sauces were developed after their early exploration of the Americas.

So much of creativity is the result of mixing diverse elements in unique ways. And it's especially rich to rant about "purity" or cultural "ownership" regarding something that is fundamentally the result of such a fusion.

EDIT: Speaking of which, if you haven't tried pasta or pizza with a Portuguese pepper-tomato sauce, you're missing out.

What they mean is that they originate from the Americas, not that it's the only place they grow, meaning it's not an ancient Italian dish. It didn't become popular in Italian food until the 18th century [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato#Italy

While they might not have been making tomato-based pastas until the 17/18th century that's still earlier than the founding of the US - I think we can credit Sicily with having some impact on tomato based pastas!

I meant the Americas as a continent not the US specifically, and yeah I agree that Italy gets to be an authority on the subject. I was mainly replying to the other person taking "tomatoes are 100% American" to mean all tomatoes are grown in America because that wasn't at all what the comment they'd replied to was saying.

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