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It is no surprise for historians of science that in any scientific field ideas which in one generation seemed to be firmly based truths should be overturned in the next. ALLAYING PUBLIC HEALTH concerns about food quality was a necessary step in America's march toward food globalization. How could one be adventuresome about new and strange foods when even familiar ones were suspect? Moreover, perceptions had to change. For example, throughout most of baking history, white bread has been preferred by the elites; the whiteness signifying purity and refinement. By contrast, brown and black breads suggested coarseness, so that in racially-mixed Spanish America, skin color was closely associated with the color of the bread consumed. Sylvester Graham had railed against white bread in the nineteenth century but not for the right reasons. He thought white bread was too nutritious to be digested properly. Regardless, Graham's railing did little to slow white bread production or to improve its yield of nutrients. Quite the contrary. The steel roller mills that came into use in the 1870s made it possible to turn out bread flour lacking both bran and wheat-germ as well as important vitamins and minerals. Interestingly, it was only after white bread became universally available that the upper classes, at least, discovered the virtues of coarse bread that was high in fiber, and the counterculture of the 1960s found practically anything brown (brown bread, brown rice, brown skin) preferable to white (white bread, white skin, White House). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… Christopher Columbus began a process that in the words from a passage in one of the books of Esdras … “Shook the earth, moved the round world, made the depths shudder and turned creation upside down.” IN THE AMERICAS, Spain and Portugal laid claim to a vast storehouse of strange new plant foods. In the West Indies – the gateway to Spain's Americas – a sampling of the groceries that greeted Columbus and his men included zamia (Zamia integrifolia), manioc (Manihot esculenta), and maize (Zea mays) – these used for breads and gruels. Then there were myriad other mysterious vegetables like sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas), yautía (Xanthosoma sagittifolium), beans (genus Phaseolus), and peanuts (Arachis hypogaea). New seasonings were encountered, such as allspice (Pimenta dioica) and chilli peppers (genus Capsicum), along with indigenous West Indies fruits such as guava (Psidium guajava), soursop (Annona muricata), mamey (Mammea americana), custard apple (Annona reticulata), sapodilla (Achras zapota), pawpaw (Carica papaya), and pineapple (Ananas comosus). And these were just a few of the American foods that Europeans had never before laid eyes on nor set tooth to. Fish and mollusks had provided much of the animal protein for those South American Tainos who had settled in the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas, but sea turtles and their eggs, land crabs (Cardisoma sp.), insects, and small game such as the iguana (family Iguanidae) – which became extinct in the West Indies after the Europeans arrived – also made contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]