American breakfast

Don't get me wrong. This is not a typical American breakfast. Rather, the ingredients are indigenous to the Americas.

The chiles evolved in Central America. Every chile that you know originating from countries across the globe owe Central America respect that they are loathe to acknowledge. We hear of Hungarian paprika because they smoked American peppers. We hear of Indian ghost peppers and Thai peppers, Japanese peppers and the like because they are hybridized and grown in unique terroir. Those countries never heard of chiles before Christopher Columbus discovered America from Europe's point of view. From American point of view, the continent was already discovered and settled for untold centuries and all those commodities previously unknown to Europe and Asia and Africa were already in use. 

Wide intense use. Not just regular use. 

Tomatoes, potatoes, corn, chocolate, vanilla, chiles, sugar cane, the list of New World plants is quite long. Imagine how boring food was all over the world before Europe finally discovered all these plants originating on the American continents.

You'd think the Swiss discovered chocolate when what actually happened is someone left their conching machine run overnight. By accident. This accidental over-processing resulted in a much smoother product. They came back the next day and went, "Oh crap! I left on the machine. Now the whole batch is ruined. Guess I'll have to try to use it anyway." While it actually made chocolate a lot better. But you cannot get a chocolate tree to grow in Switzerland except by extraordinary measures including the application of light. The trees grow only along a narrow band on both sides of the equator. Beyond that, you get nothing.

Nothing!

The trees must grow in the shade of larger trees. That's how persnickety the plant.

Vanilla orchids must be germinated by a specific bee or else you get nothing.

Nothing!

In lieu of the bee growers must resort to incredible measures. Hand germination. For a process that is available only one night. There is only one chance to germinate the bloom. And they must return to the same plant night after night to get at the blooms maturing in sequence on the same plant. Over and over and over. 

A process so tedious that it begat a new industry of criminal banditry. The exact same thing as neighbors observing a marijuana plant being cultivated. The plants are rustled just days before harvest. And that means neighbors are watching closely. Imagine a vanilla bean farmer hand-pollinating his entire crop night after night. Then right at the crucial moment the entire crop of mature beans is stolen overnight. 

Like the early European observers watching melipona bees pollinating vanilla orchids growing alongside a porch, the marijuana grower had neighbors observing them toiling over their plants. 

Then stole them. 

The guy does all the work then some pot head steals his effort. 

You'd think Italians invented tomatoes the way they prat on about the ones they grow along a volcano. As if only Italians have volcanos. As if only Italians can grow tomatoes. Admittedly they are very good, but it's not only Italians who can do that. There are excellent volcanic conditions all over the world. 

The cheese has a British name but it's made in the United States from American ingredients by American industrial methods. 

The bacon in the corn bread is made by techniques developed in the United States and from hogs that were hybridized in the United States.

Corn is classically American, an incredibly flexible plant.

And no nation on earth grows wheat as Americans do. You'd think China would have picked up on this by now. They copy everything and everyone after all. But they haven't. No place on earth has hybridized corn and wheat as Americans have. Some things are simply inimitable.