On the left and right we complain about new “foods” landing in our country: the blue crab, the torpedo fish, the wakame seaweed… But “colonization” from outside has always happened.
The egos of peoples are-although it seems foolish to imagine it-much more outsized than those of the individuals who comprise them. At every moment in human history, any people believes itself to have arrived at its highest physical, mental and cultural expression. And it is deeply convinced that the worst is all concentrated in the past and there is nothing better than the present.
This attitude involves deep fear and aversion to anything that comes from outside, be it a migrant, a technology, a way of being or a food. In the age we are living in, we have also invented a single word that manages to define and connote in terms of concern anything that faces us from the outside: “ALIEN“.
The invasion of alien foods
The phenomenon is even more striking in the food sector. From everywhere there are alarms and pleas for something to be done to stop The invasion of blue crab, torpedo fish, wakame seaweed…
And those who shriek the loudest often do so while they are sipping a cup of coffee or licking a chocolate, two aliens who, in our neck of the woods, cannot take root even by bothering with genetic engineering. If fears and proclamations were followed (and have been followed over the millennia) by facts, we would be here eating only chicory and broccoli, dousing them with that fresh water which, by building monumental aqueducts, the Roman Empire had contrived to bring almost everywhere.
The consequences of the discovery of America
To understand the concept, it is sufficient to focus on the alien invasion that followed the discovery of the Americas and try to understand why that invasion did not result in any “resistance.”
Italy, understood as a geographic and ethnographic entity (we will have to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century to even identify the political one), at the end of the fifteenth century was outside the great political games of Europe. And so it remained, in the centuries immediately following, forced to be a spectator to the events then taking place. But a people rich in history and culture, matured over millennia at the center of a system of trade and human exchange, could not passively live this role of spectator.
So here, in every part of the peninsula, attitudes of interest in everything coming from those distant, newly discovered lands are being activated. Although no one has yet quite figured out exactly where and how they are.
The only certain element to operate on, therefore, are the new products and the fact that their names respond to a sequence of foods that are everyday for us today might suggest that a decisive role in this approach to the New World was played by that atavistic “hunger” that, willy-nilly, zigzags along like a basting thread throughout our history. 
Instead, no, there are products that are today fundamental in the diet of every Italian, such as the tomato and the potato, that manage to arouse interest solely for botanical and aesthetic reasons, or for magical attributions, but which struggle to be recognized as foods for at least two centuries.
And also those assimilated more quickly on our tables, such as corn, have had before that the honor of having been the object of study and source of creativity for such brilliant minds as that of Raphael Sanzio and of theArcimboldo.
The integration of alien foods
Looking back over the histories of the centuries that followed the discovery of the New World, the minimal, everyday ones as well as the official and learned ones, another aspect of our liveliness in passivity. I nuovi prodotti, una volta accettati ed inseriti nel ciclo alimentare, non si pongono di fianco a quelli preesistenti, come avviene in tutti gli altri paesi europei, conquistando da quel momento in poi un proprio spazio autonomo, ma si trasformano e si integrano creando immediatamente “new” foods.. This is the case with potatoes, which arrived in northern Italy in the wake of Napoleon’s troops and immediately turned into “gnocchi.” 
Or of the corn which, both in the kingdom of Naples, where it was introduced by the Spanish, and in the Veneto, where it arrived thanks to the resourcefulness of Venetian merchants, immediately changes its appearance into “polenta.” Or again of the tomato which, when it is finally accepted as a food, in cooking treatments loses its outward characteristics altogether, except for its color, and becomes sauce and gravy, ready to marry, creating fascinating new recipes, with meats, fish, cold cuts, vegetables, cheeses, olive oil and pasta.
Similar vicissitudes accompany other New World products, such as peppers and chilies, beans and green beans, squash and zucchini, turkey and cocoa. And for all of them the breakthrough, the creative leap, is determined by the encounter with those typically Italian raw materials that already form the scaffolding on which the daily diet of that period rests and that today represent the cornerstone of the “Mediterranean diet.”
A real revolution at the table thanks to the invasion of alien foods
If the discovery of the New World marked a moment of radical change in every aspect of European society, economy, and politics, a change in which the Italian populations were also radically involved, from the point of view of the minute daily life, no country was revolutionized as ours was. Two centuries after the famous first voyage of Christopher Columbus, the scenery in which Italians moved every day had completely changed, from crops in the fields to market stalls to home preparations ..
History books do not usually deal with these things. But of no less importance than the chronicle of wars and treaties is the relief that in just a few years our very environment, both rural and urban, had changed in colors, smells, tastes. And had changed, and for the better, the nutrition of our populations, and with it our way of life, and perhaps even our way of thinking.
The change in nutrition
That renewal of Europe, flaunted by all looking mainly at the deployment of armies and state coffers, had been realized by us critically accepting the seemingly most insignificant novelties, a tuber, a fruit, a bird, combining them with our everyday historical legacies and from there creating a truly new way of being and doing things, nurtured and at the same time untethered from the vestiges of the past and as far into the future as ever.
It may sound trite and reductive, but the new Italy, that Italy that is often admired and envied throughout the world, was born in the gardens that welcome the products of the New World. Its cuisine, now often evoked as a symbol and synthesis of many of our qualities, owes a great deal to the American land and to all other distant lands. It is to them that he addresses his deepest and most heartfelt thanks.
So much for alien food invasion….
Freely excerpted from “RuvidaMente.com,” courtesy of author Stefano Milioni: The invasion of alien foods – RuvidaMente by Milioni
