Near a Thousand Tables (35 page)

The reverse effects—the new eating habits induced by ecological exchange in the New World and the Southern Hemisphere—have been even more profound, partly because the cultural impact of colonization has been greater (so far) on the New World than the Old, but partly, too, because the peoples of the Americas and the South had fewer edible species at their disposal, especially of fauna, than their counterparts in Eurasia and most of Africa five hundred years ago. Imagine the food of Argentina or the United States without steaks. Or of the Deep South without molasses or yams or pork or collard greens. Or of the Caribbean or the Carolinas without rice. Or the economy of the prairies without wheat. Or of New Zealand and Australia without sheep. Or of Jamaica without bananas. Where would South Africans be without their brij or Australians without their barbie? To make arroz cubano, spread boiled rice and top it with an egg and a banana, both fried in olive oil, and serve with tomato sauce. Eggs and tomatoes were available in the New World before the coming of the Spaniards. Rice, olives and bananas, however, were Old World imports. In Toronto, I had a memorable meal of wild salmon chowder, caribou sausages and bison steak in a restaurant specializing in “First Nations” food. But the soup contained cow's cream, the sausages had peppercorns in them and the steak was well dressed with garlic, which was almost certainly a post-Columbian introduction to the Americas. (In case any readers have been unable to try it, I should say that the meat of the American bison is utterly delicious, with a gamey flavor reminiscent of venison and a consistency similar to free-grazing beef. Not that I care, but it also has less fat and cholesterol than chicken.)

It is tempting to pick out the well-documented, conscious transpositions of biota as the heroic highlights of the story, or focus on the legends of culture heroes
who bore the gifts across the oceans. Columbus is fairly credited with a lot of “firsts.” From his first ocean crossing, he brought back descriptions and samples, including pineapple and cassava. On his second transatlantic voyage, he took sugar to Hispaniola—but let it grow wild; pigs, sheep, cattle and wheat made their first appearance in the New World on the same occasion. Juan Garrido, a black companion of Cortés, first planted wheat in Mexico. The Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra laid out the first gardens and vineyards in California. The story of Raleigh introducing potatoes to England is false but has an honored place in legend. By inspiring the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps made it possible for Red Sea fish to colonize the depleted waters of the Mediterranean (though the difference in salinity between the two seas made the journey impossible until the Aswan dam barred Nile water from the sea: now more than 10 percent of eastern Mediterranean fish are of
Red Sea origin
).

The real heroes, however, are surely the plants and animals themselves, who survived deadly journeys and achieved leaps of acclimatization, sometimes—in the case of seeds—with little human help, by accident, traveling in the cuffs or pleats of the clothing of unwitting carriers, or in the weft of bales and sacking. In terms of volume and contribution to global nutrition a few instances stand out and demand attention. Out of Eurasia to New Worlds in the Western and Southern Hemispheres went wheat, sugar, rice, bananas and major meat-yielding and dairy livestock. The grape variety
Vitis vinifera
should perhaps be included, because of the importance New World wines made from varieties of it have attained in the world market; but there were grapes of a sort in the pre-Columbian Americas and the natives could have developed wine if they had wanted to. (Perhaps they did: the archaeologist James Wiseman has recently urged colleagues to start looking for evidence.) The correspondingly most important gifts of the New World to the rest were maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes and chocolate. Any review of these goods has to start with wheat, because of the depth of the revolution it effected and the extent of its spread across the world.

The great natural grasslands of the world lie where the ice age glaciers did not reach, on soils too dry or infertile to bear forests, and in the subtropical niche between equatorial forests and deserts. Three huge areas, all in the Northern Hemisphere, dominate the category and typify the range. The Eurasian steppe curves like a bow from Manchuria to the western shore of the Black Sea, north of the mountains and deserts of Central Asia. The Great North American plain rolls from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi valley and the Great Lakes, sloping
gently toward the north and east. The North African savanna and Sahel form a strip across the continent between the Sahara and the rain belt.

For most of history, the Eurasian and American environments had much in common: both were more uniform and more tenaciously grassy then their African counterpart, with only patchy intrusions of woodland, except for the tongue of “forest steppe” which laps Central Asia. They had virtually no reliable floodplains, and a relatively limited range of grasses, dominated by types of needlegrass. In Africa, by contrast, the true grasslands of the Sahel blend with savanna to the south, where there is much greater diversity: intermittent tree cover, a more humid climate, plenty of good agricultural soil and a gigantic larder of big game. Even in the most steppelike part of the plain, the native grasses are more varied and more succulent than Eurasia's and America's. The floodplains of the Niger and Senegal Rivers create fields which are fairly good for millet. This was therefore a type of environment where Africans had a historic advantage. By conventional measurements—the extent of farming and sedentary industry, of city life, of monumental architecture, of literate culture—civilizations in grassland Africa achieved more conspicuous modifications of nature than those
in other continents
.

None of the great grasslands, however, naturally produced much in the way of plants edible to humans. These were environments people exploited vicariously, hunting the creatures that ate the grasses. Although this makes for a satisfactory way of life to those who practice it, the waste of energy is obvious. For maximum efficiency, the best strategy is to grow plants for human food, rather than wait for the ruminants to convert grass into meat. For most of the past, on the Great Plains of North America, three conditions inhibited the introduction of agriculture. There was ample game—giant quadrupeds in Paleolithic times, great herds of bison when the giants became extinct (above, p. 64). The soil, unaffected by the last ice age, was tough and invulnerable to preindustrial tools. And no humanly edible plant was available that would grow in it in sufficient abundance. Even as late as 1827, when James Fenimore Cooper wrote
The Prairie,
it seemed a place without a future, “a vast country, incapable of sustaining a
dense population
.” The habitat lacked the ecological diversity that encouraged civilization in the Sahel; it could and did serve, like the Eurasian steppe, as a highway between the civilizations which flanked it: but, even at the height of their wealth and grandeur, the cities of the North American Southwest, between the Rio Grande and the Colorado, and those of the mound builders of the Mississippi bottom to the east were relatively small-scale adventures which never generated the copious and productive exchanges of culture and technology that rattled back and forth between Old World cultures and made the steppe a vital link.

At the very moment that Cooper described it, the prairie was beginning to experience a slow invasion of white squatters, which would eventually contribute to a new look for the plains as a land of rich farms and cities. Today the Great Plains are the “bread basket of the world” with some of the most productive farming ever devised in the entire history of mankind. They also have a recent history of ranching which is still practiced with prodigious success on the high plains to the west and south of the region. It seems incredible that a land now so thoroughly adapted to human needs should for so long have been the domain of nature, where farming was confined to a few poor and tiny patches and where sparse populations trailed the great American bison. A similar revolution has overtaken the South American grasslands known as the pampa, which were even more wretchedly endowed by nature than the prairie: instead of big meaty bison, their native grazer was the small, skinny guanaco, a kind of wild Ilama. Now it supports the world's most productive beef industry.

Only invaders from the Old World could effect this magic. The first stage was colonization by European weeds and grasses which made the pampa and prairie able to support sheep, cattle and horses instead of just bison and guanaco. Purslane and Englishman's foot created what Al Crosby called “empires of the dandelion.” Weeds made the revolution work. They “healed raw wounds invaders tore in the earth,” bound soil together, saved it from desiccation, refilled “vacated eco-niches” and
fed imported livestock
. The conscious transpositions followed: horses and cattle, first—domesticable quadrupeds of a kind unknown in the New World since the Pleistocene. Then men and wheat: after Juan Garrido's efforts in Mexico, the lower levels of the central valleys proved highly suitable for wheat and although most of the population continued to rely on maize, wheat bread became a badge of urban sophistication. Within a few years of the conquest, the city council of Mexico demanded a supply of “white, clean, well cooked and
seasoned bread
.” The valleys supplied Spanish garrisons all over Central America and the Caribbean.

Not all efforts to introduce wheat in other parts of the Americas were successful, at least at first. The Spanish colonists of Florida in 1565 brought wheat seed, together with vine cuttings, two hundred calves, four hundred pigs, four hundred sheep and unspecified numbers of goats and chickens; in 1573, however, “herbs, fish and other scum and vermin” sustained them when rations were short. Corn bread and fish, foodstuffs copied from the indigenous diet,
were their mainstays
. Similarly, the first English colonists in Virginia were unable to grow food for themselves and relied on precarious doles from the natives to see them through their “starving time.” Investors and imperialists back home blamed colonists' moral
deficiencies for these failures; but the problems of the mutual adaptation of Old World agronomy and New World environments were formidable, especially for settlers of exposed seaboards in an era of imperial competition. Colonies sited for defense, behind marshes or swamps, in enervating climates, needed generations of investment and long periods of heartbreakingly high rates of mortality before they could be made viable. At every stage of European colonization of new worlds, the remarkable thing is not the high rate of failure but the perseverance which led to ultimate success.

The Mexican model—exploitation of wheatlands for export and for feeding a few urban centers, with transitional or marginal ranching, perpetuated on unfarmed land—was transferred to the North American plains as soon as the requisite technology became available: powerful steel plows to turn the sod; wheat strains produced by scientific agronomy to flourish in a capricious climate and unglaciated soil The enterprise had to be underpinned by an industrial infrastructure. Railways transported the grain across what would otherwise be uneconomic distances. “Balloon”-light house frames from precision-milled sticks and cheap nails housed settlers and spread cities in a region bereft of most
construction materials
. Construction gangs and city dwellers created demand for ranchers' beef. The Spanish army that invaded New Mexico in 1598 came accompanied by thousands of head of cattle, which their masters drove over mountains and deserts—including the terrible sixty-mile waterless stretch known as the March of Death. To Spanish cattlemen, the pampa and prairie were the last frontiers of an enterprise which began in the Middle Ages, when ranching was adopted as a way of exploiting the empty, conquered lands of Extremadura and parts of Andalusia after the Muslim population had fled or been expelled.

Finally, wielders of repeating rifles destroyed the vital links in the earlier ecosystem: the buffalo herds and their human hunters. Myth depicts the plains as an arena of “manifest destiny,” where Native Americans were victimized by a white “evil empire.” They are better described as a zone of imperial competition where the white men's empire contended with that of the native imperialists, the Sioux; who, by dint of organization and ethos focused on war, almost succeeded in subjugating the other peoples of the prairie. Something similar occurred in the pampa, where the talented war chief of the late eighteenth century, Cangapol “el Bravo” almost succeeded in uniting the culture area of the guanaco hunters under his rule. The outcome of the wars, and of the ecological invasions that preceded and accompanied them, was surely the most complete and surprising transformation of a natural environment by human agency in the history of the world. When one considers the vastness and intractability of the prairie, its hostile soil and its
ornery climate; when one remembers the origins of wheat in wild grasses hardly masticable by human jaws and barely digestible by human stomachs; when one considers for how long this near-desert was incapable of sustaining more than its own sparse, indigenous population; when all this is taken into account, the achievement that has made the American Midwest what it is today seems hardly credible. The heroism of the brawny farmers, striding through waving wheatfields, in paintings of the Wisconsin school looks ridiculous to uninformed visitors to the university collection in Madison; but it is profoundly appropriate.

Except for a few conservation parks where the buffalo still roam, the last bit of prairie was put under the plow in the Peace River valley in Alberta in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the success of the prairie experiment, which was in itself a triumph of the transmission of crops and techniques from the Old World to the New, inspired, in its turn, Old World imitators. An American model was already in the mind of Alexis de Tocqueville, when he was charged by his government with the role of adviser on Algerian affairs in the 1840s—when the transformation of the prairie was barely beginning. He understood all too well that America was an empire as well as a democracy, practicing naked aggression to expand at neighbors' expense. All its soil was won by expropriation and bloodshed. Tocqueville believed that the conquest of Algeria, with its narrow but rich coastlands, its vast inland plains, its great open spaces and its untapped resources, would put France in possession of a sort of Old World America—a frontier where the same level of input and achievement could be encouraged among colonists, while the native races were penned in doomed desert reservations.