Food Factoids of the day

From Archology magazine:

The genome tests prove that the sweet potatoes in Polynesia originated in South America.

Sweet potatoes were domesticated some 8,000 years ago in Peru, where Polynesian sailors may have encountered them on a voyage and then taken them home. The oldest carbonized sweet potatoes found in the Pacific are some 1,500 years old, and the word for “sweet potato” in many Polynesian languages resembles the Quechua word for the food

and they have a related item about the chocolate trade:

traces of theobromine and caffeine have been found in 1,200-year-old bowls from an archaeological site near Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. These are the oldest-known ingredients of chocolate to be found in North America, and their presence indicates that people living in the northern Southwest had access to cacao beans from Mesoamerica.

If you went to school in the good old days, much of what you learned is wrong. Read 1491.
lecture on vimeo.