Apple Pie and Such

 

Apple Pie and Such

            I love apple pie. It is so good. It is sweet, delicious, and tastes like apples (or sometimes pie). The ingredients in an apple pie are apples, sugar, butter, and flour. So today I had a hankering for apple pie. I smelled one and the smell levitated me to it like in the cartoons. But instead of being denied the pie like in the cartoons I just took the pie and ate it whole. Then I ran away before the owner of the house could call nine. It was awesome. I forgot where I was going with this. Anyway, apple pie is made up of many ingredients, I think. Ingredients like what I listed in the second sentence of this thing. So that got me thinking "Hey do the ingredients I eat originate in the Americas or Afro-Eurasia and how do they relate to the Columbian Exchange?" Because that's the kind of thoughts that normal people have in their free time.

            Ok so let's start with apples. Those are those round things that are in the store; I'm sure you've seen them. So they originated in the Old World and were brought to the Americas by Europeans probably. Apples are resilient to most climates and are now grown in the Americas as well. Next comes sugar. Sugar had been cultivated for thousands of years in Polynesia and the rest of Afro-Eurasia (Old World). When Europeans found how well sugar grows in the New World, the markets of the Old World were greatly upset.

            Butter, surprisingly, comes from milk, which even more surprisingly comes from these big things called cows. Considering cows came from the Old World, it stands to reason that butter also did. Cows are now found on farms in the Americas and have become a staple product there. Finally, flour, which is made from grains. Grains come from the Old World and are grown everywhere now.

Alex Zaytsev