Biography

Gregorio Saldarriaga Escobar is an Associate professor of History at the Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia), where he has also been coordinator of the Master and the Research Group of Social History, and director of the Research Center of Social Sciences and Humanities. His work has focused on the history of food during 16th and 17th centuries in Colombia and Latin America, emphasizing the relationship between production, symbols, and identities, and how they were all transformed by the colonial system. He has a Ph.D in History from El Colegio de México A.C.

Project Summary

This project examines how Europeans arriving in America during the 16th and 17th centuries used botanical, medical, and dietary knowledge of the Renaissance to describe and categorize indigenous fruits. The novelty of these crops and the ambiguous place that fruits had in the medicine of that period were an important aspect of explaining their “new” nature