Cooking new foods from the Americas in Catalonia

Abstract

Food is a vital need of all human beings, always and everywhere, transformed from the simply biological into a complex cultural construction. The discovery of the Americas in 1492 represents one of the most transcendental encounters between different civilizations and between different food systems. The discovery was reciprocal, and food travelled in both directions across the Atlantic. And not only was it a food interchange between Spain and America, but also a global diffusion, across all known continents.