Tracing Mexico’s Complicated Relationship With Rice (NYT)
“To the Old World there flowed such indispensable things as maize, chocolate, chiles, tomatoes, avocados, potatoes and rubber. The Americas, in turn, received the wheel, the horse, sugar, wheat, livestock, a syllabic script and, of course, rice. The changes the Columbian Exchange wrought are so profound, so embedded now in our way of life, that it is hard to imagine the world before them. It boggles the mind to think of India, where I grew up, as not having chiles until only five centuries ago. Or Italy and Greece doing without tomatoes. As the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, who had served as ambassador to India, puts it in “Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey” (1980): “The discovery of America initiated the planet’s unification.””
