🌽 Vegetarian food in the Americas

The oldest complete food system on the continent is vegetarian, and it rests on three plants grown together: maize, beans and squash. The Mesoamerican milpa plants all three in one field, and their proteins complete each other on the plate. The maize is nixtamalised — steeped in an alkaline solution that releases its niacin and lets it be ground — and that is where bean tacos, tamales and pozole come from. North American succotash is the same trio under another name, inherited from the Algonquian nations.

From the Caribbean down to Brazil runs the rice-and-beans belt, the most universally invented dish in the world: Costa Rican gallo pinto at breakfast, Cuban moros y cristianos, Jamaican rice and peas cooked in coconut milk, Brazilian feijoada. Around it the tubers do the rest: cassava as yuca con mojo, plantain as patacones smashed and twice-fried, and in the Andes the potato, of which Peru counts thousands of varieties — papa a la huancaína, causa limeña.

Two more recent arrivals finish the picture. Nineteenth-century Indian indenture brought to Trinidad the split-pea pholourie and the grilled-aubergine baigan choka, direct cousins of dishes from Bihar. And Jamaica gave the region its one doctrinal vegetarianism: the ital cooking of the Rastafari, without refined salt or animal products, whose emblem is coconut-milk ital stew.