available to any single culture. In the Western
world, fruit has been eaten as dessert at least
since the Greeks; recognizable salads go back
to the Middle Ages, and boiled vegetables in
delicate sauces to 17th-century France.
Prehistory and Early Civilizations Many
plants came under human cultivation by the
unsophisticated but slowly effective means of
gathering useful plants and leaving a few
seeds in fertile refuse heaps. Judging from
archaeological evidence, early Europeans
seem to have relied on wheat, fava beans,
peas, turnips, onions, radishes, and cabbage.
In Central America, corn, beans, hard
squashes, tomatoes, and avocados were
staples around 3500 BCE, while Peruvian
settlements relied heavily on the potato.
Northern Asia started with millets, cabbage
relatives, soybeans, and tree fruits in the apple
and peach families; southern Asia had rice,
bananas, coconuts, yams, cabbage relatives,