I read a paper recently by Colin Khoury and colleagues about the origins of the food that we consume. The centers of diversity of a crop are usually at or near the place where they were originally domesticated. Thousands of years ago, farmers in these regions decided which characteristics of plants they wanted to concentrate in the next generation, and which they wanted to weed out, and bred the appropriate lines together, giving us today’s crops. Since only a few characteristics were chosen for breeding, today’s crops have decreased diversity compared to the wild descendants of those wild ancestors, which have remained untouched by humans. For example, the most diverse wheat cultivars and wild wheat relatives are found near the Fertile Crescent, which is considered to be the primary region of diversity, and the region where wheat was most likely first domesticated.

According to the Khoury paper, close to 70% of the foods currently produced and consumed in different parts of the world are “foreign crops”. That is, most of the food that is consumed today in most countries is not local. The exceptions are a handful of countries in Asia and Africa, since they consume crops that were domesticated locally and continue to grow these traditional crops as their major source of calories.

This made me think about how dishes that we think of as belonging to a particular cuisine haven’t really been around for too long. Take the Pasta Arrabiatta for instance. The wheat for the pasta was first cultivated in West/Central Asia, the tomato originated in South America, chillies came from Central America, garlic was probably first grown in Central Asia. Only olive oil originated in Italy/Mediterranean regions. Similarly, a lot of food that is thought of as classic Indian cuisine, couldn’t be more than a few hundred years old. The Bengali dish Aloo Posto (potatoes in poppy seed paste) is entirely foreign - potatoes came with the Portuguese, poppy seeds likely came with the British. But, any Bengali worth their fish will claim that it’s a quintessentially Bengali dish.

I feel that this is an important fact to keep in mind, especially when faced with claims by celebrity nutritionists that you must only eat the food that your ancestors ate, whether these ancestors lived 100 years ago, or in the Paleolithic age. Humans are constantly evolving, as is our food.