“All Spicy Food Is From Latin America”
“many Indonesians, or Malaysians, etc., do know the botanical history of the capsicum, just like some Texans know that conquistadores actually brought over their “longhorns” and many Italians know that pasta is probably originally Arab (not Chinese, like in that Marco Polo story, which is fake) and that their famous red sauces often lean pretty hard on the Central American tomatl, (one of a few words from Nahuatl that actually traveled into Western European society, instead of the other way around).
But for people in India or Thailand who don’t know that all spicy food is from the Americas, it can be pretty jarring. Here’s a conversation I just had with a well-educated, multilingual Indonesian…
She got really mad at me, and I understand why. There is a lot about deep globalization and its effects that is so counterintuitive that it’s hard to process easily. We have been changing the world in strange ways for a long time. But humans have stupid primate brains, and we tend to naturalize whatever is right in front of us…
In a few hundred years, we may look back at our own times, and think it was just as insane that we privileged deregulated financial capitalism and #branding over all other possible versions of globalization, remaking the world in the image of Coldplay and Uber rather than, say, universalizing democracy or labor rights.”
