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Industrial crops, especially cotton, rubber, quinine, and tobacco, have become widely grown for non-food purposes. Cotton is common in clothing, rubber has many industrial uses, quinine contributed to the destruction of malaria, and tobacco contributed to many negative health effects. [3]
Aspirin – Indigenous Americans have been using willow tree bark for thousands of years to reduce fever and pain as were the peoples of Assyria, Sumer, Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. When chemists analyzed willows in the last century, they discovered salicylic acid ; the basis of the modern drug aspirin.
A Wichita village surrounded by fields of maize and other crops. Gathering wild plants, such as the prairie turnip (Pediomelum esculentum, syn. Psoralea esculenta) and chokecherry (Prunus virginiana) for food was a practice of Indian societies on the Great Plains since their earliest habitation 13,000 or more years ago. [3]
Indigenous cuisine of the Americas includes all cuisines and food practices of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.Contemporary Native peoples retain a varied culture of traditional foods, along with the addition of some post-contact foods that have become customary and even iconic of present-day Indigenous American social gatherings (for example, frybread).
Food historian Lois Ellen Frank calls potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, chili, cacao, and vanilla the "magic eight" ingredients that were found and used only in the Americas before 1492 and were taken via the Columbian Exchange back to the Old World, dramatically transforming the cuisine there. [17] [18] [19] According to Frank, [20]
Chinese food first made its way to the United States in the mid-1800s, via Chinese prospectors and railroad workers. It wasn’t until the post-war period of the 20th century that average ...
Virtually absent from most present-day Western diets, seaweed and aquatic plants were once a staple food for ancient Europeans, an analysis of molecules preserved in fossilized dental plaque has ...
When complete, the list below will include all food plants native to the Americas (genera marked with a dagger † are endemic), regardless of when or where they were first used as a food source. For a list of food plants and other crops which were only introduced to Old World cultures as a result of the Columbian Exchange touched off by the ...