Gopa D.

This statement can easily be justified by the following points -
(i) Traders and travellers introduced new crops to the lands they travelled.
(ii) Ready food stuffs in distant parts of the world might share common origins. It is believed that noodles travelled West from China to become spaghetti.
(iii) Arab traders, perhaps took ‘pasta’ to Sicily in Italy.
(iv) Many of our common foods like potatoes, soya,
groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies were not known to us. These foods came from American Indians and we became gradually dependent on these.

Various examples are given below in order to understand the statement clearly
(i) Many of our common foods like potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies, sweet potatoes were not known to our ancestors till five centuries ago. These foods were introduced in Europe and Asia after America was discovered.
(ii) Europe’s poor began to eat better and live longer with the introduction of the potatoes.
(iii) Ireland’s poorest peasants were so dependent on potatoes that during the Great Irish Potato Famine (1845 to1849), around 10 lakh people died of starvation in Ireland and double the number emigrated in search of work.