Geography on Cuisine

Different cultures have different cuisines. Food was influenced by the place where people settled geographically. This means that if a geographical area was fertile, the people who settled there would most likely adapt to eating foods that grew there. On the other hand, people living by the sea would adapt to fishing for food. Different cuisines and their preservation are also influenced by the climatically conditionals of a region. As people continued to migrate and interact with others, they learnt to adopt new cuisines as well as ways of improving theirs. The more people interacted through migrating in different geographical areas the more they exchanged different cuisine varieties mainly through barter trade (MacVeigh, 2009).

Influence of cuisines is also seen during the slave trade and the end of the slave trade. The slaves were settled in different geographical areas especially the middle and southern America, where they exchanged different cuisines with the locals. The other factor that led to the influence of cuisines was the colonization of countries. Before the European countries started exploring countries in America and Africa, the locals grew crops and had their own cuisines.  Thus, when they arrived, they introduced and incorporated some of the cuisines with their own to come up with a new cuisine. They adopted some of the cuisines that they found in the new countries back to Europe and introduced theirs in the locals (Civitello, 2008).

The incorporation of these cuisines from different regions brought about the formation of new methods of preservations. Each cuisine was preserved differently according to the geographical conditions; if a place was too hot, different preservation methods were used with those that lived in a cooler climatic condition thus helping people learn different methods of preservation of cuisines. Incorporation of different cuisines also helped people learn new methods of cooking. Different cuisines were cooked differently and thus as people incorporated new cuisines they learnt new methods of cooking (Pilcher, 2006).

For example, the Picadillo is a Latin American recipe that originated in Cuba. This is an indication of how different cultures intertwine and borrow ideas from each other. The onions and garlic used in the recipe originated from Asia while oregano can be traced back to Greece and the cumin to Egypt. Green peppers, on the other hand, are believed to have first appeared in Hungary while potatoes are from Chile and Peru. This demonstrates how different ingredients from different countries are combined to form a recipe in an entirely different country. It is a proof of how cultures borrow recipes from each other.