Native Foods

Blueberries and many other berries, corn, cranberries, tomatoes, potatoes, maple sugar, wild rice, avocado, squash, wild cherries, sunflower seeds, and the ever popular chocolate and vanilla were all first encountered here on this continent!

When one looks at the foods that Native people cultivated it makes one reel with the question, "What the heck were they eating over in Europe?" Pasta without tomatoes? Ice cream without vanilla and chocolate? Unimaginable!

The Story of the Strawberry

Adapted from Foods the Indians gave us by William and Vernon Hayes, Ives Washburn, Inc, New York, NY

When Roger Williams landed on these shores almost 400 hundred years ago, he was surprised to see that besides the small and sweet strawberry, the Native people had cultivated the very large pear size strawberries. Back in England, strawberries were quite tiny and fetched the phenomenal price of thirty dollars a pound. That amount would be astronomical today! When he saw the large strawberries that the Natives were growing he decided to bring some of the seeds back to England with him. Unfortunately, they tasted like wood. However, the English took the seeds from the tiny strawberries that he had and mixed them with the seeds from the large berries to produce the different varieties that we eat today.

Cashews

It was the Native people that showed the settlers how to remove the poisonous shell from the cashews, revealing a delicious and nutritious nut inside.

Chocolate and Vanilla

There is a place in the lowlands of Eastern Mexico where bees and insects pollinate the beautiful flowers of the vanilla plant. Everywhere else that it is grown, it must be pollinated by hand, flower by flower. It takes a full year for the pods to develop before they are ready to harvest. The Indians of South America and Mexico took the flavorless beans and through sophisticated fermenting process that is still used today, prepared the beans for a delicious drink.

The same was true for chocolate. The beans grew inside large pods that were cut down from trees with machetes and given to the women and children to dig the beans out of the pods. Like vanilla, they were fermented for several days before they made a drink from it.

The use of chocolate swept the world and soared as vanilla and cane sugar was added.

Tomatoes

The Spanish brought back seeds from the Americas early in the 1500s. However, it was almost 400 years before people all over Europe put their fear aside and ventured forth to eat the tomato. Although the Italians ands the Spaniards did eat them early on, in other countries they were viewed as merely decorative annual plants. Fears that tomatoes were poisonous continued until the late 1800s.