Where did rice originate?

As you know, many big changes happened after Christopher Columbus and other Europeans came to the Americas 500 years ago. Today I’m going to talk about a change in the world diet—the way people cooked and ate. Five hundred years ago, there was a big change in the diet of people all over the world.
    Let’s talk about the diet in Europe 500 years ago. One important food was meat. Europeans ate many kinds of meat, including beef, lamb, goat, and pork. Europeans also ate dairy products—milk and cheese—made from the milk of cows and goats. The Europeans ate several different grains: Most people ate wheat, and some people ate rice, which came first from Asia.
    Now, let’s look at the diet in the Americas about 500 years ago. The diet of the native American was quite different from the diet of the Europeans. This is because the European means, dairy products, and grains didn’t exist in the Americas. However, the native Americans ate some food that didn’t exist in Europe. The native Americans ate different vegetables, such as potatoes and tomatoes. They ate different grains, such as com. They ate different meat, such as turkey and other wild birds. They also used spices such as chocolate and hot chili peppers. None of these foods existed in Europe 500 years ago.
    Now let’s talk about the big change in the world diet 500 years ago, after Columbus and the Europeans went to the Americas.
    After Europeans went to the Americas, the diet of the native Americans changed a lot. When the Europeans went to the Americas, they took many new kinds of food with them. The Europeans gave some of the food—the meat, dairy products, and grains—to the native American’s and then the native Americans started to use the European food in their cooking. As a result, the diet in the America’s today is very different from their diet 500 years ago. For example, if you go to a country like Mexico, you can see that the traditional Mexican food uses a lot of beef pork, cheese, wheat, and rice—all foods that came from Europe with Columbus.
    After the Europeans returned to Europe from the Americas, there was also a big change in the diet of people in Europe and the rest of the world. When the Europeans returned to Europe, they took many new kinds of food back from the Americans. They took back the vegetables, grains, and spices that they found in the Americas. Little by little, people all over Europe started using the new foods in their cooking, and then the foods spread around the world to Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
    Some of the new food spread very quickly around the world. One example is the chili pepper. You may be surprised to know that 500 years ago, the chili pepper didn’t exist in many countries that are famous today for their hot and spicy food made with chilies. Actually, we think that the first chili pepper was taken to Spain by Columbus in 1493, when he returned from the Americas. After only 100 years, chili peppers had spread all around the world. They grow easily in warm weather. The only place that the chili pepper did not become popular was Northern Europe, probably because it is too cold to grow chili peppers easily.
    Although chili peppers spread quickly, other foods from the Americas spread very slowly. Potatoes are a good example. It took about 250 years for the potatoes to spread around the world. The reason it took so long is that Europeans thought that potatoes were poisonous. The potato looked a lot like a very poisonous plant that grew in Europe. People were afraid to eat potatoes! For a long time, people only used potatoes to feed their pigs. But slowly, people started using potatoes as food for themselves. Today, of course, potatoes have been very popular in many diets, especially in Northern Europe and North America.
    So the next time you sit down for dinner, think about the history of the food you are eating—maybe it was a part of the great change in the diet of people all over the world.