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The Incas used llamas to transport maize 

 and potatoes to state warehouses. 



also adventurous eaters: seaweed, toads, 

 lupine leaves and seeds, caterpillars, nas- 

 turtium blossoms and roots, mayfly larvae, 

 dried lizards, and so many kinds of greens 

 that the chronicler Garcilasco de la Vega 

 (1539-1616) declined to even list them. 



Coe supplies fact or anecdote about 

 many of the ingredients. "Columbus was 

 the first European to eat a pineapple, 

 which he did on November 4, 1493." "The 

 word tomatl in Nahuatl, the language of 

 the Aztecs, means something round and 

 plump." Drinking cups have been found in 

 Maya burials with the glyphs for "choco- 

 late" written on the vessels' rims. During 

 one of their festivals, the Aztecs spread 

 turkey eggshells on the streets, celebrating 

 "the goodness of the god who had given 

 them that fowl." 



The book is most interesting, however, 

 when the author goes beyond the ingredi- 

 ents and talks about cuisines. She focuses 

 her discussion on the features of pre- 

 Columbian cuisines that are most unfamil- 

 iar to us. First, because the notion of a sta- 

 ple food has disappeared from our own 

 cuisine, she repeatedly emphasizes the de- 

 gree to which the Aztec, Maya, and Inca 

 societies buUt their menus around maize. 

 Maize was eaten green, ripe, and dried. It 

 was soaked, crushed, ground, and fer- 

 mented; baked, boiled, roasted, steamed, 

 and popped. It may not Uterally have been 

 used in every dish, but when it was avail- 

 able maize seems to have appeared in 

 every meal. 



A second characteristic of these 

 cuisines is that almost everything was fla- 

 vored with chili peppers. Readers who 

 have traveled in Mexico or Peru will be 

 aware of how important hot peppers are in 

 these countries, but until you have 

 watched people shake ground chile on co- 

 conut and pineapple, eat chicken or turkey 

 in chocolate and chili pepper sauce, and 

 chew up whole peppers that are too hot for 

 you to even touch, you may have difficulty 

 appreciating that simple truth. Even the 

 statement that prehistoric Native Ameri- 

 cans "ate nothing without them" seems in- 

 adequate. But Coe makes this point mem- 

 orably by reporting that for the original 

 inhabitants of highland Mexico "the sim- 

 plest fast.. .was to abstain from salt and 

 chili." The Spanish may have viewed 

 chiles "as a mere condiment," but to pre- 

 Columbians they were "a dietary comer- 

 stone, without which food was a 

 penance." 



America's first cuisines, in contrast to 

 the cuisines of Europe and to modern 

 cuisines in general, were low in fats. Pre- 

 Columbian diets included little meat (in 

 the case of the Maya, so httle that Euro- 

 pean observers "described Maya life as 

 perpetual Lent"), and what meat the peo- 

 ple got tended to be lean. Squash seeds, 

 cacao beans, peanuts, and avocados are all 

 good sources of vegetable oils, but these 

 were dietary supplements rather than sta- 

 ples, and no pre-Columbian society seems 

 to have extracted edible oils from such 

 sources. In addition, the diets of con- 

 quered and conqueror alike were different 

 from our diets today in that the conquest- 

 era cuisines regularly included starchy liq- 

 uids. 



A "class of foodstuff that is extinct in 

 our lives today," writes Coe about the 

 starch-based drinks that the Aztecs called 

 atolli, was "sold from shops full of jars 

 large and small, on the street comers as 

 well as in the market." She lists more than 

 a dozen variants of this beverage, differen- 

 tiated by how the basic maize was pre- 

 pared and what kinds of flavorings or for- 

 tifiers were added. The Maya mixed 

 soured maize dough with water to make 

 posolli, and also made as many kinds of 

 atolli as their highland neighbors. Andean 

 peoples made maize-based drinks called 

 chicha and drank such hquids almost ex- 

 clusively. Of pure water, a seventeenth- 

 century historian of the Inca Empire, 

 Bemabe Cobo, commented that "there is 

 no greater torture for [Andean Indians] 

 than to make them drink it, a punishment 

 which the Spaniards inflict on them occa- 



78 Natural History 5/94 



