You cannot walk on water or raise the dead. But you can do something that Jesus never did: eat a banana. Or a tomato. Or a potato. Just walk into any

Why Jesus Never Ate a Banana

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-25 23:30:06

You cannot walk on water or raise the dead. But you can do something that Jesus never did: eat a banana. Or a tomato. Or a potato. Just walk into any supermarket on the planet to get either of those, or any of the other once-regional crops that have gone global since Golgotha.

This map shows the various regions of origin for 151 of today’s staple food crops. It illustrates an astounding fact that has become so commonplace that we hardly ever give it a thought: just how “foreign” much of the food on our plates actually is.

Those bananas Jesus never ate? They come from South Asia. And those tomatoes and potatoes? We now firmly associate them with the kitchens of Italy and Ireland, respectively. But they are both natively American. The latter two crossed the Atlantic in what became known as the Columbian Exchange: the merciless mixing of Old and New World things after 1492.

With the specter of famine forever hanging over pre-modern society, new cultivars were eagerly sought out and brought over. In 1551, the Spanish saw their first potato, high up in the Andes. In 1567, just 16 years later, they were already growing them on the Canary Islands.