Did Columbus also open the exploration of the modern diet?

Abstract

On the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage of discovery, one aspect that merits particular attention is its influence on food and nutrition worldwide. Columbus found an unexpected wealth in food resources rather than the gold he sought. The sailors came from a continent where famine was well known and had subsisted for two months on a typical seamen's diet of preserved foods, primarily hardtack and salt pork. They made landfall in green and fertile islands. The foods that constituted the core of the diet of the Americas before 1492--from maize to potatoes, beans to tomatoes, to numerous other fruits and vegetables--became the true patrimony that the inhabitants of the New World bequeathed to humanity. These foods, new to the Old World, provided the basis for the exchange and evolution of networks of food production and consumption which, with many trials and errors and with no preestablished plan, characterize modern nutrition. The diet of Mediterranean countries, now universally recommended for nutritional health, is high in several foods, tomatoes and beans in particular, that originated in the New World.