This lesson is about native and imported vegetables. One-day, when Amma served potato curry, Mani’s favourite dish, he refused. He told that potato is a foreign vegetable and he would like locally grown food. Tomatoes, pine-apple, com, ladies fingers were other foreign vegetables. When Mani asked how these vegetables reached India, his father explained that merchants brought them by sea. The merchants came to India to take spices and in turn Portuguese gave us potatoes. The chillies were grown in south America where Columbus discovered it and later it reached India from Portuguese. Before chillies, we used pepper in cooking.
