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By Root 2733 0

of the New World were slow in revealing themselves. Though the woods of New England abounded in hearty sustenance – wild duck and turkey, partridge, venison, wild plums and cherries, mushrooms, all manner of nuts and berries – and though the waters teemed with fish, the Pilgrims showed a grim reluctance to eat anything that did not come from their dwindling stockpile of salt pork (which they called ‘salt horse’), salt fish and salt beef, hard tack (a kind of biscuit baked so hard that it became more or less impervious to mould, weevils and human teeth), dried peas and dried beans, ‘almost preferring’, in the words of one historian, ‘to starve in the midst of plenty rather than experiment with the strange but kindly fruits of the earth’.1 Or as another put it: The first settlers had come upon a land of plenty. They nearly starved in it.‘2

Lobster was so plentiful that ‘the least boy in the Plantation may both catch and eat what he will of them’, but hardly any did. John Winthrop lamented in a letter home that he could not have his beloved mutton but only such impoverished fare as oysters, duck, salmon and scallops. Clams and mussels they did not eat at all, but fed to their pigs. To their chagrin the colonists discovered that English wheat was unsuited to the soil and climate of New England. The crops were repeatedly devastated by a disease called smut. For the better part of two centuries wheat would remain a luxury in the colonies. Even their first crop of peas failed, a consequence not so much of the challenges of the New England climate as of their own inexperience as farmers. With their food stocks dwindling and their aptitude as hunter-gatherers sorely taxed, the outlook for this small group of blundering, inexperienced, hopelessly under-prepared immigrants was bleak indeed.

Fortunately, there were Indians to save them. The Indians of the New World were already eating better than any European. Native Americans enjoyed some two thousand different foods, a number that even the wealthiest denizen of the Old World would have found unimaginably varied. Among the delicacies unique to the New World were the white and sweet potato, the peanut, the pumpkin and its cousin the squash, the persimmon (or ‘putchamin’ as the first colonists recorded it), the avocado, pineapple, chocolate and vanilla, cassava (source of tapioca), chilli peppers, sunflowers and the tomato – though of course not all of these were known everywhere. Even those plants that already existed in Europe were often of a superior variety in the New World. American green beans were far plumper and richer, and soon displaced the fibrous, chewy variety previously grown in Europe. Likewise, once Europeans got sight and taste of the fat, sumptuous strawberries that grew wild in Virginia, they gladly forsook the mushy little button strawberries that had theretofore been all they had known. The Indians’ diet was healthier, too. At a time when even well-heeled Europeans routinely fell prey to scurvy and watched helplessly as their teeth fell from spongy gums, the Indians knew instinctively that a healthy body required a well-balanced diet.

Above all, however, their agriculture had a sophistication that European husbandry could not begin to compete with. They had learned empirically to plant beans among the corn, which not only permitted a greater yield from the same amount of land but also replenished the nitrogen that the corn took away. As a result, while Europeans struggled even in good years to scrape a living from the soil, the Indians of the New World enjoyed a constant bounty. That a single tribe in New England had sufficient surpluses to support a hundred helpless, unexpected visitors for the better part of a year is eloquent testimony of that.

The Indians’ single most important gift to the colonists – apart from not wiping them out – was corn. Corn began as a wild grass, probably in the Tehuacán Valley of central Mexico. Converting a straggly wild grass into the plump and nutritious foodstuff we know today was possibly the greatest of all precolonial achievements.