The Columbian Exchange was an exchange of plants, fruits, vegetables, disease, and other items between the Old World (Europe, Asia, and Africa) and the New World (The Americas) after the explorations of Christopher Columbus in 1492.

Christopher Columbus is known mainly as the sailor and explorer who was in search of a faster and easier way to reach Asia. However, his name is also synonymous with a specific event and that is the Columbian Exchange. In 1492, when Columbus left Portugal he had no idea he was going to find a treasure trove of new foods. In the New World, he was introduced to items such as peppers, tobacco, and chocolate. He would bring these items back to Europe to introduce them to society and then in 1493, he would bring items like horses, cattle, and pigs to the New World. Throughout the Age of Exploration, explorers and colonists would continue this exchange of crops and animals. Unfortunately though, there was a very dark downside to the new trade routes. Diseases would end up spreading rapidly killing many Natives in the new world and slavery would become a growing institution during this time.

What we now consider to be the "traditional" cuisines of Europe are heavily flavored with the products of the Columbian Exchange. Before 1492, the Italians—hard as it is to believe—ate no tomatoes. The Irish ate no potatoes, the Spanish no peppers, the Swiss no chocolate. For tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and cocoa—like corn, cassava, peanuts, avocados, strawberries, pineapple, vanilla, and tobacco—are species native to the Western Hemisphere, brought back to Europe for the first time as the literal fruits of colonial success.But the rapid integration of American foodstuffs into European recipes was only the most obvious of the cultural adaptations brought on by the Columbian Exchange. On both sides of the Atlantic, people proved remarkably willing to reorganize entire social structures to make better use of previously unknown plants and animals.Potatoes didn't exist in Europe before 1492. They first appeared in Ireland sometime in the late-16th century, and very quickly, the starchy tubers—high in calories, easy to cultivate, and capable of rot-free storage in the ground—became the island's staple crop. The increased nutrition provided by potatoes allowed Ireland's population to explode, from 1 million in the middle of the 17th century to 8 million 200 years later.

When a devastating potato blight struck the crop in the 1840s, the result was mass starvation and an exodus of millions of desperate emigrants. The terrible consequences of the Great Famine revealed, in tragic clarity, the incredible extent to which the potato—a favorite food of the Incas—had become an indispensable part of Irish culture and society.