Article is mainly about the Baltics, but I always wondered what Italians ate before tomatoes came from the Americas.
Bread, olives (and olive oil), cheese, meat, fish, fruit, nuts, wine.
That being said I think the ubiquitousness of tomato sauce even in modern Italian cuisine is overestimated.
https://www.theeternaltable.com/historical-recipes/tortellin...
This is also a major base of French cuisine and called Mirepoix.
On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus. No wheat, no pork/beef/chicken, no dairy, no onions, no cabbage, no oranges/apples/figs, any citrus and much much more.
Potatoes and corn, losing though would be absolutely tragic. Also avocados.
Having grown up on plenty of both wild venison and farmed cattle, they are pretty different, not to mention that different types of venison are also quite different from each other. So I'm not sure I would consider venison and beef interchangeable simply by familiarity. White tailed deer and gemsbok, specifically, I find the best tasting and much better than beef.
They couldn't find one mammal from which to obtain milk? It's a pretty obvious thing to try, for obvious reasons.
I guess that lactose-intolerent people today would drink milk rather than starve - do they get zero nutrients from it? - and that evolution would select for those who could survive that way.
I think you're missing why milk is useful though. Dairy allows you to take resources that aren't calorically useful like grasslands and turn them into food. You can consume it either immediately or later via preservation techniques like cheese. Even if you consume it immediately, milk is a seasonal product.
Dairy also isn't the only way of turning unusable resources into food though. You can eat the animal, for example. That's less efficient if you're limited to a single species, but cattle and other large livestock suitable for the scale of milk production you're talking about are so phenomenally inefficient that you're likely better off if you consume more efficient animals instead.
There is none of that in my comment.
> I think you're missing why milk is useful though.
? I was saying it is useful, and therefore I expect Homo sapiens would adapt to it.
After writing the GP I was told that humans, and some or all mammals, have a gene that disables lactose tolerance when they reach the stage of life where they no longer need milk. A miniority of humans have a mutation that stops that process, making them lactose-tolerent.
Why haven't we evolved to consume milk lifelong, given its obvious advantages (or why have we evolved to become lactose-intolerent past early childhood)?
A guess: Obviously milk consumption is inherited from mammal ancestors. That provides plenty of time (66 million years +) and population to evolve lifelong lactose digestion.
But other mammals don't have much need for that adaptation - for the most part, they can't figure out obtaining milk from another species as a regular food source. Human ancestors didn't figure out tool use until 2.6-3.3 million years ago; would we have figured it out then?
My guess is that it required domestication of animals ~12 thousand years ago before non-childhood milk consumption was commonplace. 12,000 years isn't much time to evolve much.
Not at all. Many pre columbian foods remain popular today, like tamales. Corn, beans, squash, fish, nuts, and tropical fruit were all staple foods in pre contact Mesoamerica. Central American islanders were big on grilling fish over coals.
I don't think it was a miserably plain diet by any means.
Compare that to pork for instance. Remove that and you've removed like 50% of Austrian cuisine.