Food Origins: Why Jesus never ate a banana

April 16, 2024 7:45 PM

69 percent of the global diet is "foreign," says a study that pinpoints the origin of 151 food crops (interactive map) Since the mid-20th century, diets around the world have become more diverse and more homogenous, with supermarkets and other retail outlets the world over increasingly offering a similar range of food options.

Research into the origins and patterns of diversity of food plants has contributed to an appreciation that specific geographical regions, for example the Near East, have been of particular importance to the development of agricultural crops and thus to the evolution of human culture [11]. Yet despite the growing body of literature on the regions of diversity of food plants, their relative contributions to modern agriculture and the current human diet have not been quantified.
The paper builds on the groundwork laid in the 1920s by Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian plant genetics rock star. When young, Vavilov had witnessed first-hand how crop failures can lead straight to devastating famines.

To be clear, I'm not liking the "foreign" even if it's in quotes. I am fascinated by where foods come from and what we think is familiar and comforting, because we've had multiple generations of importing and consuming those foods.

posted by winesong (22 comments total)

Very tangentially related: one piece of evidence for the geographic origin of Proto-Indo European in Eastern Europe and Central Asia west is médʰu, the word for honey which narrows down its early locales to ones with honeybees.
posted by migurski at 8:58 PM on April 16 [3 favorites]

I thought he just didn't like the texture very much
posted by Carillon at 11:59 PM on April 16 [2 favorites]

Too sexy to consume in public. In private, though, it might have been another story for Mr Water-to-Wine. "OK, for my next trick, I'm going to need to borrow someone's bandana..."
posted by pracowity at 3:27 AM on April 17 [2 favorites]

I'm surprised to see apples coming from Europe. I read a whole book about them once, I and could swear that the book said that the most likely origin was in Kazakhstan.

Interesting stuff, though, thanks for posting!
posted by clawsoon at 3:47 AM on April 17 [2 favorites]

A great book on the subject is the biography of David Fairchild, The Food Explorer, about the guy that largely single-handedly brought much of the world's edibles to America where they were often morphed into what we eat today.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 4:25 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

I mean, *some* foods have to originate in Europe, even if we're all horrible colonialist dirtbags with no culture of our own otherwise. What would the original whiteys have eaten, otherwise?
posted by HypotheticalWoman at 4:35 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

I'm surprised to see apples coming from Europe.

Domesticated apples are a mix of central asian apples and european crabapples.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:40 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

Atlas Pro (a YouTube channel) has some videos about where fruits and vegetables and such come from. Some are on this playlist
posted by Acari at 6:28 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

I'm surprised to see apples coming from Europe. I read a whole book about them once, I and could swear that the book said that the most likely origin was in Kazakhstan.

I read a whole book about them once too, and it definitively said that apples originated in the Garden of Eden.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:38 AM on April 17 [3 favorites]

Cool map, but it's odd that they excluded Mexico from North America. I know the reason is racism, but it seems an odd criteria for a map about food and geography. It seems strange to have Arizona in a different grouping than Sonora, but the same one as Nunavut, for example.
posted by signal at 6:43 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

Cool map, but it's odd that they excluded Mexico from North America. I know the reason is racism, but it seems an odd criteria for a map about food and geography.

Because the foods that originated in central and southern Mexico plus Central America are quite distinct from those that originated in the US and Canada? You could make an argument that northern Mexico should be grouped with the US SW, but most of the foods that we think of as having an origin in Mexico didn't come from the north.

Fundamentally, the whole map uses modern borders, which doesn't make any sense, but jumping to racism here seems a little extreme.
posted by ssg at 7:16 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

Look. We see stories about Jesus as a kid, and then we see stories about Jesus as an adult. His teachings as an adult are trimmed down versions of the Mahabharata, which could indicate he left the middle east, traveled to India, ate a banana, and then came back with that life experience to teach about the wonders of foreign trade and diets.

Truth be told, it was fish, loaves, and bananas - but they always leave out the part about the bananas because noone but Jesus knew what to call them.
posted by Nanukthedog at 7:16 AM on April 17 [3 favorites]

Interesting idea but this seems more like politics and economics more than Science. What is 'foreign'? Does it mean something native to a region 100 miles away from me? They seem to define it using modern political boundaries which makes zero sense scientifically. I mean:

For the analysis of changes in use of foreign crops over time, food supply data were assessed for each year from 1961 to 2009, and production data for each year from 1961 to 2011. In order to align all time periods and include as much of the world's population as possible, the current countries formerly comprising the USSR, Yugoslav SFR, Ethiopia PDR and Czechoslovakia were aggregated into their former countries, with national data summed per year for production measurements, and merged by weighted average based upon the population of the respective states during the respective reporting year for per capita food supplies measurements. Belgium and Luxembourg were reported together during 1961–1999, and therefore recent years listing the countries separately were merged as above.
...
Regions were delineated following national borders in order to form manageable units for the assignment of primary regions of diversity of all crops...

I think signal means that the US-Mexico border is a fairly arbitrary line (sure, a lot of it is the Rio Grande but not different ecological zones) It would make more sense in fact if there has to be a division to delineate tropics/deserts and so forth instead of arbitrarily pushing in Nationalism and employing the word 'foreign' in an ostensibly scientific paper. Vavilov centers often refer to countries but only in order to roughly locate a geographic area and not implying there's some sort of cliff at the national boundaries.
posted by vacapinta at 7:28 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

It sounds like their input data in terms of supply and production was all delineated using national boundaries, so they stuck with that for the mapping. I'm not sure how effectively you could disaggregate the national data to instead follow ecoregions, either.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:32 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

I read a whole book about them once too, and it definitively said that apples originated in the Garden of Eden.

The Bible never mentions what kind of fruit it was that grew on the tree of knowledge. People call it an apple, but that's not stated in the book of Genesis.
posted by Zumbador at 9:13 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

The Bible never mentions what kind of fruit it was that grew on the tree of knowledge. People call it an apple, but that's not stated in the book of Genesis.

What, next you will tell me that Jesus wasn't actually a tall skinny ultra-white guy?
posted by Dip Flash at 9:23 AM on April 17 [2 favorites]

Quince was the fruit on the tree of knowledge. I thought Rosie Perez confirmed that on Jeopardy back in the 90s.
posted by ovvl at 10:16 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

Jesus: "Mark, Luke, John -- I need to tell you guys something I just heard about from my dad upstairs. It's bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S."
posted by AndrewInDC at 10:20 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

Domesticated apples are a mix of central asian apples and european crabapples.

That’s why they’re called Granny Smiths, and not Babushka Umitzhans.
posted by rh at 11:19 AM on April 17 [3 favorites]

FYI, the reason Thanksgiving day food is often pumpkin pie, turkey, cranberry sauce, is because those are american ingredients. It's kind of a bastardization of indigenous cuisine. nobody eats acorns though, for some reason.
posted by picklenickle at 1:26 PM on April 17

acorns require a lot of processing to be safely eaten so I think they probably get dropped when easier options are around
posted by supermedusa at 2:46 PM on April 17

vacapinta: I think signal means that the US-Mexico border is a fairly arbitrary line …

I mean that if we're going by arbitrary labels like North America, Europe, South America, etc., Mexico is in North America, and there's no good reason to not include them in North America except for the observation that certain kinds of people habitually forget or seem confused by this fact.

Any explanation of the "oh, but its more similar to X" would be equally aplicable to a few dozen other cases that don't get commonly mislabelled because they're not seen as 'other' by the people doing the mislabelling.

TLDR: I meant: racism.
posted by signal at 3:45 PM on April 18 [1 favorite]