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The excerpts from travelers’ accounts in this section show the fascination with the Americas. Thomas Hariot, Theodor de Bry, and Samuel Purchas were all well known for their published accounts, despite the fact that Hariot was the only one who had traveled to the New World, while De Bry and Purchas based their descriptions and images from first-hand accounts of expeditions across the Americas, from the Strait of Magellan to Newfoundland and everything in between.
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Can you imagine Kansas without wheat fields, Italy without marinara sauce, or Spain without gazpacho? Wheat, tomatoes, chili peppers, and many other foods were transferred between the Old and New Worlds, the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492
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Food, in particular, was fascinating to Europeans in the New World, and descriptions of food, as well as indigenous cooking and eating practices, formed a large portion of travel accounts.
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Scores of accounts, both text and image, describe foods with which we are now familiar, like corn, potatoes, chili peppers, pumpkins, cassava, prickly pear, banana, cacao, turkey, and a wide variety of fish.
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De Bry was an engraver who produced the above illustrations from a nine-volume set of books about European expeditions to the Americas. Note the abundant edible resources in the images, as well as efficient Native American farming practices.
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With the discovery of the New World, Europe secured enormous tracts of fertile land suited for the cultivation of popular crops such as sugar, coffee, soybeans, oranges, and bananas.
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Seventeenth-century texts reveal much about this complicated interweaving of foods and their origins, as well as praise and criticism of these foods in contemporary diets. Maison rustique, above, originally printed in France as a guide for running an estate, was translated into English in 1600. -
Books were printed to convince Europeans to become investors and plantation owners. The above excerpt is from one of those texts. Ligon’s treatise enticing people to participate in the sugar industry of Barbados touted the virtues of specific area and outlined the financial incentives. The author describes the beautiful land and exotic foods, details modern technologies for processing sugar, -
The desire to control these newly-discovered foods and other natural resources led to dramatic human consequences. In an effort to produce and transport new edibles, European empires scrambled to claim land in the New World, impacting the culture, language, religion, and politics in the Americas for centuries.
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Some foods became wildly popular and spread quickly throughout Europe, like chocolate, the product of cacao, and tobacco, sometimes considered a food or medicine at this time.