Columbian Exchange - What's Europe's Deal?

In the effect of  what was later labeled as The Columbian Biological Exchange Europe got primarily new vegetables and fruit.

Potatoes, tomatoes, corn, tobacco, pineapples and cacao and chocolate.

Potatoes – grew wild along the Peruvian coast more than 13,000 years ago.  The oldest proofs of potato cultivation by the shores of Lake Titicaca reach back to more than 7,000 years ago. Potatoes were once thought to act as an aphrodisiac.

Tomatoes (pomi d’oro) – can you even imagine a day without eating tomatoes, this red veggie, which in fact, technically is a fruit?

Corn - this first known "genetically altered" crop was staple food of the Maya Civilization and one of the Iroquois Three Sisters cultivation system.  This extremely efficient self containing and self enhancing arrangement is still widely used by natural gardeners like Alice at Renee's Garden.


Unlike organic sweet corn production, mass corn plantations, cause problems including the lesser known nitrogen run off issue discussed in Greenstream's Blog and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Tobacco – considering the fact that most people identify tobacco with bad habits such as addictive and harmful chewing or cigarette smoking, it may be hard to understand why anybody would even bother with “eco-tobacco”.


The fact is, before Columbus, the natives applied tobacco for medical purposes.  For centuries, if not milenia, farmers have used tobacco as organic pesticide.

Pineapples – fresh pineapples are the only known source of bromelain, an anti-inflammatory enzyme used to treat a number of medical conditions, but it is particularly effective in reducing inflammation from infection and injuries; sinus and pulmonary diseases, surgery, wounds and burns recovery and arthritis. 


Organic Hawaiian pineapple can be ordered from Kanalani Ohama Farm.

Cacao and chocolate – the Mayan superfoods, have been increasingly becoming the new red wine for their nutritive and physical health and mental well-being enhancing properties including an incredibly rich supply of magnesium calcium, zinc, iron, copper and potassium. Cacao also contains more antioxidant flavonoids than red wine, green tea and blueberries.