Where did that ingredient really come from?

We look at a lot of menus here at simpleERB HQ. Sometimes it’s because we’re hungry, sometimes it’s because we’re interested in what our users serve in their restaurants, mostly it’s because we like good food. Looking at menus, you quite often get a feel for what trends are doing the rounds but one thing that we’ve seen more than anything else over the last few years, are menus telling you exactly where your food came from.
This is no bad thing. In a society where we are much more informed about the world we live and eat in, it’s good to know the name of the farmer who supplied your asparagus or the farm which provided the Aberdeen Angus steak. Do we really know where the actual ingredient came from in the first place though? We know that the radish on your plate (yes, THAT actual radish) came from a producer in nearby Gascony but was the radish always indigenous to this region? Did someone bring it from somewhere else? Have the Italians always had an affinity with the tomato, or did they come from South America?

Luckily, people much smarter than us, have created an interactive map showing the origins of many of our favourite foods so we can now while away the hours looking at yet another map whilst being amazed that we hadn’t heard of the cow pea until now!