Food of North America after 1500

In 1500 AD, most of the people living in North America, like the Pueblo, the Cherokee, the Iroquois, and the Mississippians, ate mainly beans and corn and squash. Sometimes people ate their corn baked into tacos or tortillas; other times they boiled it into mush or soup. To go with the beans and corn, they ate the meat of wild animals - venison (deer meat), rabbit, or pigeon. If they lived near a lake or a river, they ate trout or salmon or the other fish that were in those rivers. They also ate berries and nuts that grew in the wild, and roots like potatoes and carrots and sweet potatoes, and another root we don't eat much today called wapato.
Some people, like the Chinook, the Inuit, or the Navajo, did not eat beans or corn at this time. They didn't farm, so they ate only things that could be gathered in the wild. In place of the corn and beans, they ate acorns or wild grass seed mashed up and cooked into flat bread or soup.

When European settlers began to settle in North America, they soon learned to eat like the Native Americans - mainly a lot of sweet potatoes and corn and beans and meat and berries and nuts. But the Europeans also brought European animals with them, so they also ate pork and beef and mutton (from sheep) and chicken. They smoked the pork to make hams and bacon, and they got eggs from the chickens. Instead of cooking on open fires like the Native Americans, the Europeans mainly cooked over fireplaces.

By the 1700's, more of the European settlers had arrived, and they began to plant wheat and barley to make into flour for bread. Now they didn't eat as much corn, but instead they ate more bread and porridge. In some places, there were so many settlers that it got hard to find enough deer or wild birds or rabbits to hunt, so keeping animals for food was the only way to get meat.

In the 1800's, as people came to settle in North America from all over the world (especially Europe, Africa, and China), they all brought their own foods with them. From Africa, people brought yams, or sweet potatoes, and black-eyed peas, and okra. From Europe came noodles, pies and cakes, and vegetables like lettuce and peas. Chinese people brought with them rice and many Chinese vegetables like bok choy.
But the biggest changes in food came in the 1900's, when the use of oil and machines made it possible to bring fresh milk and vegetables to the cities all year round, by putting Florida oranges and California avocados on fast trains. Oil engines also made possible canned food and refrigerators, both in stores and in people's houses. Because of the machines being used to plant and harvest food, and the machines being used to process it, food became much cheaper and easier to get than it had been before. The most important difference of the 1900's is that suddenly very few people were hungry, where in the past - from the Stone Age to the 1800's - most people never knew what it felt like to have enough to eat.

But some things still stay the same. Most of the crops grown in North America today are the same ones grown before the Europeans came - corn, sunflowers, beans and potatoes. And the fruit and meat that people ate before the Europeans came are also still important in North America today - salmon and turkey and blueberries.

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