Mary Blaine Campbell summarized the deep transformation in European customs and food ways by the phrase “you are what you eat”. In the Early Modern period, Europe obtained from its colonies some of what it had acquired previously in small quantities and at high prices. Other products were new to Europeans. Sugar and spices from the East came to Europe with the Crusades. Coveted and highly prized, they were seen as belonging to lands close to paradise. Medieval and Renaissance food was heavily spiced on the tables of the European elite with the only difficulty being price. If Europe cannibalized the world, as Mary Campbell contends, the views it held about new commodities were key to their cultural integration in Europe. Columbus’s voyage was unsuccessful in reaching the luxuries of Asia but brought the largest unintentional biological exchange in the history of mankind. Famously called the Columbian Exchange by historian Alfred Crosby, the exchange’s impact on the world – both Old and New – continues to this day. The exchange had consequences that none of Europe’s theologians, medical doctors or thinkers could have imagined. Fixed on the idea of Creation, Europeans had to ask the very important question: why did they not know what they were encountering? After 1492, European explorers faced unknown plants and animals. Sensitive to the economic importance of the luxuriant vegetation they encountered, Europeans collected samples of the new goods and thus Spanish galleons brought coconuts, maize, potatoes and chillies back to Seville together with silver and gold. The encounter between Europeans and this new world of food transformed their culinary habits, but did so extremely slowly. Unlike the Chinese, Europeans did not adopt these New World foods with ease. Their

resistance to several New World foods was extraordinary. It took Europeans several centuries to culturally integrate foods they viewed as low in the hierarchy of foods they had culturally constructed.2