True. There's a huge variety of plants with edible bulbs, roots, and tubers native to North America.
There's a number of Chenopodium species that have been partially or wholly domesticated around the world. It really is quite a useful genus.
It depends on the crop, but yes, it took a few...
Sweet potatoes are definitely of tropical origin, but summers in much of the United States are warm enough for successful cultivation.
Interestingly though, there is a native edible tuberous Ipomoea species, I. pandurata, that grows as far north as Ontario. With minimal selection (mostly to...
You're thinking of Galanx :)
I am of Taiwanese descent with a good amount of aboriginal ancestry though none of it recent and only from tribes that have long been assimilated.
I mean, the majority did sinicize in the 18th century. I, and the majority of Taiwan's Han population, am proof of...
For a crop to be introduced and then widely planted in a variety of climates, it needs to be adaptable. The Andes are home to at least 10 root crops, yet only the potato has been widely adopted. And even then it took a few centuries for the potato to gain the adaptations (most importantly the...
Full-on domestication is probably possible for oaks, but hasn't really happened anywhere in the world. Even where people historically or still use acorns for food in Eurasia, such as Korea, oaks tend to be part of managed woodlands rather than orchards. The long time between generations (10+...
Humans have been growing and selecting Old World fruits and nuts like apples and pistachios for millennia and we still largely haven't been able to break them of their alternate bearing habit. The problem is physiological: energy expended towards fruits and seeds in one year means less energy...
Tofu, or rather tōfu, is the Japanese name for it.
As evidenced by Ben Franklin's name for it, and based on the way Hokkien vs Mandarin words for tea spread, tofu would probably be known by a variation of the Hokkien name dauhu or tauhu (which for the same reason is the Malay word for tofu...
That didn't stop Korea and Vietnam from largely abandoning Chinese characters in favor of phonetic writing systems. Anyway, the earliest examples of Japanese literature that wasn't written in Classical Chinese used neither hiragana nor katakana, which renders them almost completely...
Even that may not be enough. Sicilian has the oldest literary tradition of any modern Italian language, with a historically important school of poetry (they invented the sonnet), yet its impact on standard Italian is fairly superficial.
In the absence of new mutations, diseases, and other environmental factors, inbreeding is pretty much only bad if you and your partner both have the same recessive deleterious alleles. If by luck of the genetic lottery your founding population has relatively few seriously negative alleles...
On the contrary, clay soils take more than three times the amount of lime than sandy soils to raise the pH to a level that is ideal for growing crops. Adding fertilizer doesn't help if the nutrients become unavailable to plants due to the low pH. At very low pH, many plants suffer from aluminum...
That's what sauerkraut and other forms of lactofermented vegetables were traditionally used for: extended storage, improved taste, and increased vitamin content. Also, canning destroys a significant amount of vitamin C.
Except Mesoamerican crops are all warm-weather crops and require water during the summer, which is precisely when most of California does not have water. Adoption of Mesoamerican crops was possible in Arizona due to the North American monsoon bringing plentiful, if sporadic, summer rainfall. The...
IIRC, in the past the US has somewhat seriously considered the use of rice blast fungus to destroy rice crops in Asia.
Synchytrium endobioticum, a fungus that causes black scab in potato, is on the US federal bioterrorism list.
Sure, but there are far, far more marriages between East Asian women and East Asian men, even among Asian-Americans, so what's your point?
Also, if there was a historical preference of European features in China, you would expect a large percentage of concubines to have been from Western China...