“Food offers many examples of long distance cultural exchange.” Support your answer with three examples.
Food offers many examples of long distance cultural exchange as mentioned below : Travellers and traders introduced new crops to the lands they travelled. Even ‘ready’ foodstuff in distant parts of the world might share common origins. For example, noodles travelled west from China to become spaghetti. Arab traders took pasta to fifth century Sicily (Italy). Similar foods were known to the Indians and Japanese people. Their origins cannot be ascertained, but the fact remains that there was long distance cultural contact even in the pre-modern world. Our major common foods are potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies, sweet potatoes. These were not known in India until about five centuries ago. These were introduced in Europe and Asia after the discovery of Americas by Christopher Columbus. Actually many of our common foods came from America’s original inhabitants i.e., the American Indians.
