Welcome Imposters
One of the books I'm currently reading is the very pleasant Wildwood - A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin. It's a terrifically somnolent tome which means it's taken me longer to read than normal, but it's well recommended.
The chapter I read last night dealt with his journey to Kazakstan to find the source of the ur-apple. I had never known until then that apples are not indigenous to the British Isles and were in fact introduced by the Romans. It's jarring to discover something that is so throughly, quintessentially woven into the fabric of our landscape and Britishness is actually an imposter. Much like my initial surprise on discovering that the chillis used in virtually every single asian dish actually hail from South America, and only in the last 400 years.
What did asian people eat before they had chillis?
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