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Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World
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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Food Revolution”
Chapter 4 opens with the function of the ancient Peruvian city of Machu Pichu, which has long been debated. Weatherford suggests the ancient Incas may have built it as an agricultural laboratory, with plant cultivation and experimentation being seen as a sacred activity by their people (62).
New World peoples domesticated cheap and nutritious crops that became vital to the Old World, especially the potato. The Quechua cultivated and developed it, as well as ways to freeze-dry and preserve it. The importation of the potato, Weatherford contends, had an even greater impact on Europe than silver. Previously the Old World diet was based on domesticated grasses: grain crops like wheat, barley, and oats. Potatoes are a more energy-rich product that require less labor than grains. They have a shorter growing time and don’t require as much attention to grow or labor to process for eating. The potato could be incorporated into a variety of dishes and provided health benefits as a valuable source of vitamin C. Potatoes were also less prone to creating cavities (67).
The potato flourished in Europe’s cool and damp growing conditions. Ireland enthusiastically embraced it in the second half of the 16th century; from there it spread throughout the British Isles, mainland Europe, and finally to Russia in the 1830s and ’40s. The improved diets provided by the potato lead to a population boom, though dependence on it as a monocrop also led to adverse side effects, like the Great Famine in Ireland. Weatherford points out that the famine caused by this blight could have been avoided had the Europeans cultivated many varieties of potato, as did the Indians, rather than only a few (70).
Native agriculture provided other important crop goods too: “The Indians gave the world three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation” (71). Beans (Europe) and peanuts (Africa) became invaluable as sources of protein. In Russia sunflowers provided oil and animal feed. The sweet potato was favored in Asia. While maize corn never took off as food in Europe, it provided animal feed; in Africa it became a primary factor in a population explosion in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the Americas corn transformed the food landscape and is used in flour, starch, and syrup forms. Finally, the “miracle grains” of amaranth, quinoa, and wild rice were, at the time of Weatherford’s writing, still untapped (75).
Weatherford ends the chapter by describing an agricultural lab in modern-day Lima, Peru, connecting it to his argued function of Machu Pichu more than 500 years before (76-77).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Indian Agricultural Technology”
In Chapter 5 Weatherford argues that the Indians provided vital agricultural knowledge to the Europeans in four major areas: farming techniques, genetic hybridization, fertilizers, and new technology to process plants into food.
Traditional Indian farming utilized milpas, fields in which Indians created small mounds to plant corn. This technique, called hilling by white farmers, has fallen out of favor despite effectively preventing soil erosion. The Indians also interplanted their crops, which allowed various plants to benefit each other (e.g., the corn shades the beans) and reduced herbivory, pest or weed damage. This “traditional polyculture increases corn yields by as much as 50 percent over monoculture” (83).
Indians also selectively bred and domesticated several plants. Planting corn kernel by kernel and fertilizing it by hand allowed for better control over the hybridization process (85). The conuco system of cultivation was developed by Indians in the tropics, where crops were grown not from seeds but cuttings and root sprouts (87). Like the selective process of planting corn kernels, this form of propagation gave natives greater control over the genetic composition of their crops. Weatherford argues, “Without question the Indians were the world’s greatest plant breeders” (87). Indian research, he believes, formed the critical basis of modern agricultural research.
Indian farmers also managed the soil itself. While European soil was often nitrogen deficient from over-planting, the Indians used fertilizers like seabird guano to enrich the soil. Europeans only discovered the utility of this nitrogenous fertilizer in the late 19th century; it quickly became Peru’s most valuable resource in the so-called “Age of Guano” (88).
The Indians also developed technologies to render otherwise inedible plants like cacao seeds and gritty maize into foodstuffs. While Europeans invented machinery to expedite the processes, the techniques were pioneered by the Indians and largely remain unchanged (91). Popular dishes like corn flakes, hominy grits, tortillas, and tamales all find their roots in Indian knowledge of chemistry and technology (92).
There is still much to be learned from native agricultural techniques. In the remote Amazon village of Genaro Herrera, the Peruvian government has set up chacras, or traditional Indian farming plots. Here researchers are learning about underutilized plants and agricultural techniques from the natives. The irony is that while the colonizers now turn to Indians to improve their own crops, the Indians “often become tied into a complicated network of economic forces that keep them very poor and working to produce food for urban elites and for foreigners” (98).
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Culinary Revolution”
Weatherford contends that many foreign dishes now thought to be staples of their country are actually dependent on New World ingredients. He points out that “American food and spices made possible the development of national and local cuisines to a degree not previously imagined” (102-3). The majority of Chapter 6 features a colorful catalogue of the “national” dishes of various places in Europe, Asia, and Africa that the New World helped create.
Peanuts and a wide variety of peppers (especially chilies) dominate the cuisine in Asia and Africa. In Europe spices and condiments, especially sauces, were enhanced by New World imports (104). Tomatoes and peppers form the basis of Italian sauces for everything from lasagna to spaghetti. In Spain the impact of the New World was less substantial, but tomatoes, peppers, beans, and potatoes were incorporated. Many Eastern European dishes, like goulash, are built on paprika, a spice made from ground sweet red pepper (105). Weatherford does not vouch for the quality of British cuisine but does nod to the British use of potatoes (fish and chips) and beans (on toast). In France a preference for milder tastes and dairy products slowed the acceptance of pungent spices and chilies, as dairy does not play well with heat.
New Englanders in the United States did not take to spices but eagerly adopted sweets like maple syrup, which they even combined with beans to make Boston baked beans (107). Also popular was seafood, which Indians taught them how to catch and prepare, as well as succotash and cranberries (107). Wheat does not grow well in the American South, which led to a particularly corn-heavy, “Indian” diet in which cornbread, hominy, and hush puppies reigned. Southern staples like artichokes, tapioca, pecans, and barbecues were all developed by the Indians. Even Creole cuisine in Louisiana, thought by many to be French, has origins in Indian food (109).
Weatherford writes, “Nowhere else in the American cuisine, however, have Indian foods had such an impact as in the snack foods” (110). Potato chips, French fries, jerky, popcorn, peanuts, and countless other snack foods originated in the Americas. Chocolate and vanilla are crucial ingredients in desserts the world over.
Few cooks or gourmets, however, recognize the broad extent to which American Indian cuisine radically changed cooking and dining in every part of the globe, from Timbuktu to Tibet (116). To Weatherford’s day, some Indian delicacies like chayote and various berries and nuts remain virtually unknown and unappreciated outside their cultural groups (111).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
In Chapters 4 through 6 Weatherford shifts focus from economics to agriculture and food. Chapter 4 details the new foods “discovered” in the Americas, which provided the literal caloric energy needed to drive innovation in Europe—and made people healthier and longer lived. Chapter 5 delves into agricultural technologies and techniques. Finally, Chapter 6 stands out as a somewhat unusual entry: it is dedicated to a catalogue of Old World foods enabled by New World products.
In these chapters Weatherford further develops a theme he had already introduced. He seeks to integrate Indian contributions into the historical record, and he also argues that “rediscovering” Indian innovations can help civilization in the present day. This lends a new urgency to his message. Though Weatherford wrote Indian Givers in the late 1980s, the reversions to Indian farming and agricultural techniques he suggests are especially prescient in light of global warming and the innovations it will soon require. Due to soil erosion caused by dense planting, “future generations may have to return to traditional hilling to preserve their farmlands” (82-83). He encourages a return to the “historical and environmental perspective” of the Indians.
Still, Weatherford does not allow the plight of the modern-day Indian to go unacknowledged: “Despite all the technological innovations of the American Indians and their history as the world’s greatest farmers, today few of them benefit from this largess” (95). Some Indian farmers have, like their ancestors before them, found ways to work within the economic forces that are so hostile to their way of life. Priced out of superior hybrid seeds developed by American corporations, Honduran farmer Elias Sánchez uses the traditional conuco method to clone cuttings of his hybrid tomato plants, effectively bypassing the need to purchase seeds (87). Others, like Peruvian colonist Hernán, are not so lucky. In debt to banks for insecticide he didn’t need, he is now learning from the local Indians how to farm sustainably while struggling to repay his debt. As he tells Weatherford, “The jungle has everything except capital. We have land and water and plants, and I have the labor, but there is no money” (96).
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