One of the most praised recent restaurants in the United States is based on an attempt to reconstruct pre-Colombian cuisine from the Americas: https://owamni.com/, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/how-owamni-bec....
replyIn that list, I think I’d only really miss apples and dairy (really just cheese) by their own virtue. Pork/beef/meat due to familiarity (which is to say, they had other meat sources, which I’m sure were just a good, if I’d grown up on venison I’m sure it would just taste like cow to me).
replyPotatoes and corn, losing though would be absolutely tragic. Also avocados.
Depends on the area. German speaking areas and Eastern Europe do use lots of potato. Even the collagial name for German is potato
replyI'm Austrian myself. There's plenty of potato dumplings etc., but they're just variants of other flour/cheese based dumplings. Potatoes are important but certainly not indispensable.
replyCompare that to pork for instance. Remove that and you've removed like 50% of Austrian cuisine.
no beef? bison were ubiquitous, though.
reply> no dairy
replyThey couldn't find one mammal from which to obtain milk? It's a pretty obvious thing to try, for obvious reasons.
The vast majority of the human population is lactose intolerant, both historically and today. Genetically intolerant populations in South and Central Asia have microbiotic help with their dairy-heavy diets, but for people who didn't spend thousands of years developing a culture around it, dairy is just a quick road to an upset stomach and/or food poisoning.
replyThat makes some sense. Given the historic sometime scarcity of food and pressure of starvation, and the widespread availability of milk, I would think people would adapt to it.
replyI guess that lactose-intolerent people today would drink milk rather than starve - do they get zero nutrients from it? - and that evolution would select for those who could survive that way.