#if i wasnt distracted id be more nuanced/detailed

[note-a-bear]

ok but i actually do wanna know what you have to say about foodways and “european culture” and colonialism so…please say more??

First things first: every Spaniard and Italian owes endless reparations for how heavily they rely on tomatoes for various national dishes.

Italians owe extra reparations for the way they've claimed the tomato as *their* vegetable.

Like, not only are these (tomatoes and potatoes) specifically only in Europe because of colonization, but their history as part of indigenous food culture has been all but obliterated in public consciousness.

I wrote this out in tags on another post, but I recently had a friend's kid say that fish and grits seemed like it should be British (the obvious association being fish and chips--incidentally, you don't have fish and chips without the colonial absorption of potatoes as a critical foodstock and mass effort to promote and expand the cultivation throughout Europe). I immediately was like, 'whoa, this is super American.'

Not like, for jingoistic or nationalist purposes but because on so many levels we ignore the indigenous roots of common foods. Much like potatoes and tomatoes, corn (whether as a milled starch in the form of meal, corn starch, polenta, or grits) has become integral to a lot of traditional European cuisine.

What is upsetting about it all is that the peoples who spent generations encouraging corn to go from a couple of funky kernels on a weird wheat stalk, who cultivated thousands of distinct varieties of potatoes made for near every purpose you can imagine, and bred the wealth of tomatoes from which we can pick out one perfectly suited to just about any type of snacking get hardly any credit.

In most food histories or chef profiles you get these farm-to-table moments that describe some kinship with produce and reverence for land and blah blah blah. But OFTEN when it's a white chef they talk as if these ingredients just came from nothing. As if it's their birthright. And sure, everyone has a relationship to food. Being fed and sustained *is* our birthright.

But it's also taken, right? It's also something that only exists (in European imagination) for ~600 years. Which sounds like a lot. But it's a fraction of the thousands of years of relation between the peoples of the Americas and the foods we now rely on.

This is kind of rambling and disconnected, and I'm using vv broad language because I'm feeling lazy about pulling out references. But I suggest listening to any of the whetstone media podcasts about foodways and agricultural histories. They're really good/useful, succinct jumping off points for a variety of different facets of food history.