"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 conquistadoresactually 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."

https://theawl.com/all-spicy-food-is-from-latin-america-317740a93ee3

FB: There is so much erased Native history. So much cultural and technological work done by these civilizations that we now assume is just natural. "The fact that, when talking of the capsicum family, we say that chili “peppers” are “spicy,” means we are committing a double linguistic anachronism (which is fine). It was of course “spices” that all those Spanish and Portuguese were looking for (especially black pepper) in Indonesia in the first place. And since chilis kinda make your mouth pop in the same way as black pepper, they got named “peppers,” and we call them “spicy,” though the biology and sensation produced are actually totally different. The word “Chili” itself is Nahuatl."