If You Love Potatoes, Tomatoes Or Chocolate Thank Indigenous Latin American Cultures

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Ancient pottery discovered in present day Honduras indicates that pre-Colombian cultures dating back to as early as 1100 B.C. made a fermented, alcoholic beverage from the sweet pulp of the cacao fruit.

Francois Nascimbeni/AFP via Getty Images

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Francois Nascimbeni/AFP via Getty Images

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Different types of potatoes seed are seen displayed in «Parque de la Papa or Potato Park, in Pisac, Peru. One hundred and fifty type of tubers from the Sacred Valley highlands are native to Peru.

Martin Mejia/AP

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Martin Mejia/AP

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Tomatoes were first exported from South America to Spain and other parts of Europe in the mid-1500s but they were initially grown as an ornamental plant and were regarded with suspicion because botanists recognized it as a relative of the poisonous belladonna nd deadly nightshade.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

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J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Tomatoes were first exported from South America to Spain and other parts of Europe in the mid-1500s but they were initially grown as an ornamental plant and were regarded with suspicion because botanists recognized it as a relative of the poisonous belladonna nd deadly nightshade.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

On the subject of tomatoes …

What’s Italian food without tomatoes?

And yet, like the other foods on this list so far, the thin-skinned fruit originated in the Andes Mountains of present day Peru and Ecuador, and is believed to have been domesticated in pre-Columbian Mexico, Britannica tells us.

Similarly, the Aztecs would argue that it’s neither toe-may-toe nor toe-mah-toe but rather «tomatl, which the Spanish later translated as «tomate as they began exporting the tasty round food to Europe during the mid-1500s.

Despite what the Spanish had seen first hand in the Americas, it took some time for Europeans to embrace the tomato as an actual food product. «In France and northern Europe the tomato was initially grown as an ornamental plant and was regarded with suspicion as a food because botanists recognized it as a relative of the poisonous belladonna and deadly nightshade, Britannica says.

There is some evidence that the first exported tomatoes may have been not red but yellow. Researchers base this theory on the fact that Italians called the tomato «pomodoro, meaning «golden apple.

It was also referred to as «poison apple in other parts of Europe, according to Smithsonian. That is because aristocrats, who were most likely to eat off of pewter plates, would become sick and die after eating tomatoes. But the truth was much more complicated. It turns out that the acidity of the tomatoes leeched lead from the pewter dinnerware and that resulted sometimes in fatal lead poisoning. (Poor people typically ate off of wooden plates so this wasn’t as big a problem for them.)

Despite the land connection to South America, the tomato was introduced to North America from Europe.

«Thomas Jefferson is known to have raised them at Monticello in 1781, according to Britannica, which adds that it was first used in food in Louisiana as early as 1812.