15 Food Crops That Originated In Mexico

Can you imagine Indian food without chili peppers? What about Italian food without tomatoes? Today, these plants are essential to their respective cuisines, but they only became a part of those cuisines relatively recently, because both chilies and tomatoes are native to the Americas. Beginning in the late 15th century, European exploration and colonization led to the dispersal of American plants and animals around the world through trade, a phenomenon known as the "Columbian Exchange" because it began with the voyages of Christopher Columbus.

While South America gave us peanuts and potatoes, and the northern reaches of North America gave us blueberries, perhaps no place in the Americas has contributed more to global food culture than Mexico. There, Indigenous people like the Maya and Mexica (Aztecs) were the first to cultivate and consume food crops that have since become some of the most important in the modern world. Here are 15 food crops you might be surprised to learn originated in Mexico.

Tomato is another word that comes from Nahuatl via Spanish: the Aztecs called this plump, juicy fruit tomatl, from tomana, which means "swelling." The domestication date of tomatoes is uncertain, but they were especially valued in pre-Columbian cooking as a source of acidity since citrus fruits like lime are not native to the Americas. European accounts describe red, yellow, and green tomato varieties in many shapes and sizes, as well as the extra-sour tomatillo, a separate species. As fat and oil were not used in traditional Mesoamerican cooking, Indigenous cooks char-roasted tomatoes until soft on a bare, round griddle called a comalli, modern comal. They were then cooked in stews or mashed with chilies, salt, and other ingredients like herbs into salsa, similar to how they are still used in Mexico today.

Despite their widespread use in Mexico, tomatoes were once thought of as poisonous in Europe and took centuries to catch on there as a food rather than an ornamental plant. This is partly because tomato belongs to the family Solanaceae, which includes deadly nightshade, and partly because of European nobles who fell ill or even died after sampling dishes made with the fruit, thanks to an unfortunate chemical reaction. When tomatoes were served on the pewter plates used by the aristocracy, the acid caused lead to leech from the pewter. These mislabelled cases of lead poisoning resulted in the tomato earning the unfair nickname of "poison apple."

Maize was domesticated in Mexico as early as 9,000 years ago from an ancestral plant called teosinte and spread from there to other parts of the Americas. Just as other societies had their own staple grains, corn was the sacred staple for Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples. In many Mesoamerican traditions, human beings were said to be created from maize; the Maya even flattened the skulls of infants to produce an elongated head shape resembling an ear of corn. Corn was ground with a tool now called a metate and used to make cornflour porridge (atole) and numerous kinds of tortillas and tamales, which were eaten at every meal. Popcorn was also well-known, made into garlands and headdresses for festivals.

Before grinding, corn must be soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution, a process called nixtamalization, from the Nahuatl word for processed corn dough. Without this step, the niacin and other nutrients present in the corn cannot be absorbed by our bodies. Indigenous Americans nixtamalized their corn in a solution of water and wood ash or seashell ash in coastal areas. When corn was introduced as an alternative staple in Europe, populations who attempted to grow it suffered from pellagra, a disease caused by niacin deficiency until they learned how to process the grain.

The word chia can be traced to a Maya word meaning "strong." Although chia and amaranth are not closely related, the two plants have much in common. Both have very small seeds that pack a powerful nutritional punch, and both are often described in modern times as "superfoods." Both amaranth and chia were important Indigenous crops in 16th-century Mexico, and both were later outlawed by the Spanish colonial government because of their use in Indigenous religious rituals.

The tiny, crunchy seeds of chia, which belong to the same family as basil and mint, are rich in an array of nutrients, including protein, fiber, omega-3 fats, and calcium. In pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, chia seeds made ideal travel provisions because they were lightweight and nutritionally dense with a long shelf-life and were often carried by messengers, who had to travel long distances on foot in a society without horses. Chia seeds were commonly included in tributary offerings to kings and temples and were also used in medicine to treat leg pain and skin conditions.

In Mesoamerican religion, the reddish, oval-shaped pod of the cacao tree was associated with the human heart. Because the tree can only grow in a humid tropical climate, the Aztecs had to trade with their southern neighbors, the various Maya peoples, to acquire cacao beans. These were used in sacred religious rituals and noted for their unique effects on the body since cacao contains caffeine, a stimulant, as well as theobromine, which produces a mild relaxing effect. Cacao beans were so valued that they were used as currency. In the 16th-century markets of Tenochtitlan, a single cacao bean could buy you a tamal; one hundred could buy a turkey.

Fermented cacao beans were roasted, ground, mixed with water, and flavored with chili, vanilla, and other spices to produce a beverage which in Nahuatl was called xocolatl, "bitter water," the origin of the word "chocolate." This was a delicacy of the upper classes in Mesoamerican societies, who drank their chocolate frothy; different cultures preferred it hot or cold. Spanish aristocrats adopted the custom of drinking chocolate in the colonial era, initially as a breakfast drink similar in function to coffee. Chocolate eventually spread to all levels of European society but was not produced in solid form until the 19th century.

Archaeological evidence suggests the domestication of squash in Mexico as early as 10,000 BC, making it one of humanity's oldest crops. Just as in Mexico today, ancient Mesoamericans consumed both the seeds and flesh of the squash and cooked it with chili and other vegetables. Squash was extra-valuable for early human societies because it had a variety of uses: the hard outer shells could be dried to make watertight storage containers, bowls, or musical instruments.

There are similar gourds native to Europe, Africa, and Asia, but most varieties called pumpkin or squash belong to one of four American species, all of which trace their origins to ancient Mexico. However, they were widespread throughout the Americas by the time Europeans arrived. Another edible species of squash now popular worldwide, the chayote or "vegetable pear," also originated in Mexico.

Many types of cactus are actually edible, especially their sweet, juicy fruits, and all of them originated in the Americas. One species of edible cactus native to Mexico is the dragonfruit; another is the prickly pear or nopal, which has been introduced to other arid, warm regions and can now be found growing wild in the Mediterranean. Nopal cactus has long held a special place in Mexican culture and cuisine. The Mexican flag features an eagle eating a snake on top of a nopal, a reference to the legendary sign from the gods that showed the Aztecs where to build their capital. The name of that city, Tenochtitlan, means "the place where prickly pears grow among the rocks."

The Aztecs cultivated cactus for food and also used their cactus orchards to farm the cochineal bug, an immobile insect that feeds on cactus juice and produces a brilliant red pigment, which saw widespread use before synthetic dyes became available. Cooking with nopales, the pads of the nopal cactus remain popular in Mexico today. Once you remove the spines, nopales can be grilled whole or cut into strips for vegetable tacos, stir-fries, soups, and pickles.

The Columbian Exchange went both ways, with some crops and livestock being introduced to the Americas from Europe and becoming major elements of the local diet. One example is cilantro or coriander, which was only introduced to Mexico in the colonial era but has a long history in the cuisines of Asia and Europe. Pre-Columbian Indigenous people in Mexico and the Caribbean didn't know of cilantro, but they were familiar with one of its American relatives: culantro, also known as Mexican coriander, sawtooth coriander, or recao.

With its long, serrated leaves, culantro looks quite different from cilantro, but it has a similar smell and taste, though stronger and more pungent. In Indigenous Mesoamerican cuisine, it was likely used in the same ways that cilantro is used today and was also recognized for its medicinal properties, used to treat inflammation and gastrointestinal ailments. Culantro is also native to the Caribbean and remains important in the food of Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. In modern times the plant has also become a popular herb in Southeast Asia, where it thrives in a similar tropical climate.