First tell me where garlic comes from.
But either way, it’s not likely I’d ever sign on to spend the rest of my life without chili peppers, chocolate, or tomatoes.
New world by FAR. Just a partial lsit of all the yummy foods I get:
Corn (well, technically maize)
Turkey
Venison (I lurves me some venison)
Tomatos
Vanilla
Pinapple
Chocolate
Peanuts (and from that, peanut butter. Enjoy life without a Reese’s Cup. If you can call that life.)
Chilis
Agave (Woo! Tequila!)
Squash (including pumpkins, and by extension, pumpkin pie.)
Raspberry, blackberry, cranberry, and cherries.
Many, many, many types of beans
Avacodo (Guacamole and tortilla chips, anyone?)
Clams (for chowdah…but shit, no cream…well, we’ll use bison cream.)
Potatos!!!
MAPLE F-ING SYRUP!!!
And here’s the kicker, something you old worlders are neglecting, methinks. It’s a biggy.
Sugar.
Plain, white, granualted, sugar. You old worlders have to make do with sugar obtained from sugar beets. Enjoy your five buck-a-pound bags of sugar. 
(I pulled that number out of my ass, i have no idea how much sugar would cost if it had to be manufactored from beets. I imagine it must be more than from sugar cane, since there is so much less in a beet, and therefore more are required, which takes up more land, more time, etc…)
Hell, if I liked seafood more, I’d be doing even better, because there’s
Lobster (speaking as someone who doesn’t even like this bug, even I know maine lobster is better than whatever lobster might be in the Asian half of the pacific ocean.)
Salmon
Trout
Crawdads
Shrimp
New world, almost entirely for tomatoes. I’ve never tried meat that I didn’t like in some form, and I could switch to corn from wheat without difficulty. But there’s just no replacing the tomato.
Much as I’d miss chocolate, tomato, corn, pumpkin, beans, avocado, potatoes, and chiles, I’ve got to go Old World.
The meats themselves are a wash…I wouldn’t like to give up chicken, beef, pork and lamb, but there’s plenty of new world equivalents…turkey, bison, moose, venison, new world sheep, capybara, lobster, whatever. You could make an acceptable alternative to bacon from the belly meat of any fatty animal, it won’t be exactly the same as pork bacon but good enough, heck maybe better for all I know. Mmmm…porcupine bacon!
However, I can’t give up wheat, rice and barley. No more bread?
I can’t give up DAIRY, what are you, drunk? I’m giving up cheddar cheese, ice cream, whipped cream, cream cheese, mozzaralla, chevre, yogurt, and buttermilk?
You can make pizza with pesto instead of tomato sauce, but how are you going to make pizza with no wheat and no cheese?
Excuse me, you’re giving up beer? You’re giving up COFFEE? Tea? Mustard? Brassicas of all kinds? Black pepper? Apples? Carrots? Celery? Onions? Garlic?
By the way, sugar cane is old world. It was cultivated in the mediterranean and was damn expensive, until it was introduced to the carribean and cultivated there.
Agreed. I couldn’t give up tomatoes. Even when my mom was pregnant with me, she had tomato cravings.
Also corn. I love corn in all its forms. I spent a semester in the Netherlands, and was struck by how much corn I eat compared to my European friends. (I became known as The Popcorn Queen, for example.)
Regarding garlic, wild onion is closely related to wild garlic and tastes more garlicky than domestic onion - like a cross between onion and garlic. I remember finding lots of it around Baltimore, and according to this page, it’s native to the States.
Old World. To hell with American cheese and American Chop Suey, and raise a cheer for Bubble and Squeak!
The “old world” has a lot of deer.
Cherries weren’t new world fruits. They were first cultivated by the Greeks and Persians, so cross those off your list. Raspberries and blackberries were found both in the Americas and Europe. I’ll give you cranberries.
Salmon can also be found off the coast of Siberia and Japan. Trout are common in Europe and Asia.
Crayfish can be found in Europe, Asia, and Africa
Most of the shrimp species commonly eaten come from America, but one species, the Giant Tiger Prawn, is found in the Indian Ocean and off the coast of East Asia.
Old World in a heartbeat. Oh, there would be pangs and the odd gnashing of teeth, but I’d get by. There are spaices from West Africa that mimic chili quite nicely, and with enough ginger and the like, my spice jones would be managable. Wine and olives and crusty bread and pasta and garlic and olive oil and…nope, I wouldn’t miss burritos a bit.
[QUOTE=Lemur866]
Excuse me, you’re giving up beer? You’re giving up COFFEE? Tea? Mustard? Brassicas of all kinds? Black pepper? Apples? Carrots? Celery? Onions? Garlic?[
QUOTE]
I’d happily give up beer, coffee, and tea, as I find all of them vile. I don’t know what a brassica is. Black pepper is nice, but loses hands down to chili peppers. I would miss the rest a bit, and I’m still holding out some hope for proof of garlic that was native to America, like the wild onion the Weird One mentioned.
And thanks for the suggestions about the bacon substitutes.
Well, the new world does have several kinds of wild alliums that can fill in for onion, garlic, shallots, leeks, and suchlike, although I’ve never eaten them. So while you won’t have official garlic you could have a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Brassicas are the members of the cabbage family…cabbages of all kinds, radishes, turnips, mustards, kale, kohlrabi, bok choy, chard, etc etc etc. And soooo many of our familiar fruits, although there would be lots of unfamiliar ones from the American tropics that could fill in. And you’d have sunflower seeds, amaranth, quinoa along with your corn for grains. And…arrowroot. And…cattail root.
Oh, you’d give up beer, coffee, hemp and tea, but all you get is tobacco and coca in return. Eyech.
But you’d have to give up cinnamon! You fool! Don’t do it! No cinnamon for your apple pie, not to mention no apples! And no pie crust!
What’s sushi count as? 'Cause whichever it is, I’m going to have to go with that.
I loves me some sushi.
“Bug” is now considered offensive. The politically correct term is “arthropod.”
You might want to rethink that: from this wikipedia link
Cane Sugar (handground) was a regular feature of pre-1492 Medieval european cooking. So enjoy yer maple sugar…
I’ve gotten pretty used to non-new world foods, cooking for the SCA, so although I’ll miss tomatoes, potatoes and chiles, I’ll have to go with “Old World”. Mostly 'cos I loves me some dairy, and I don’t know what kind of milk llamas give, nor am I brave enough to try and milk a bison!
I think this is a fairly pointless question and hard to define. What do you mean by “Old World Food” and “New World Food”? By now the foods have gotten completely jumbled up and people pretty much everywhere have a long history of using foods from both hemispheres as integral parts of their cuisine.
Are we entertaining a thought experiment where only foods obtainable in your hemisphere are available or are you to food that you could reasonably get by living in a particular region (e.g. no llama meat if you live in Canada)?
I think that apart from people who have made a serious study of the matter few people really know what they’d be eating when presented with the question. Sure, many of us know a lot of what grew in what hemisphere before they came in contact, but most of us don’t have that much experience puting one or other set of ingredients together to make a full-fledged cuisine.
But many of us do, and that is what makes this kind of question interesting and thought-provoking. Just because you can’t, doesn’t mean others can’t. Besides, arguing about food is like arguing about music: fun because it is pointless, and fun because you just might learn something new in the process.
Gotta go with old world, but I’ll miss chiles something fierce. They don’t agree with me anyway, though.
Ahhh, I thought sugar cne was found in the West Indies. My mistake. Still, I can live with using maple sugar.
As far as the other items on the list that were incorrect (well, mostly just items that weren’t Americas exclusive), I just got the list from a website with a list of foods from the new world. Though thinking back now, I don’t think they said all of them were exclusive to the new world.
I agree that this topic is interesting, but I think it’s useful to point out how wierd it is to ask it.
Are we allowed to be inventive and come up with our own diets, or do we have to stick with some particular pre-Columbian regional diet? Is this a case where we once ate a mixed diet and then are told we have a choice about which set of ingredients to get rid of?
Many old world crops are now new world crops and vice-versa (apples, corn, etc…). They have been for some time now too.
I’m nοt trying to be a wet blanket, I just find this part of the question at least as fascinating as talking about what you would or wouldn’t keep.
(Also, which would you really want once you got a taste of whichever cuisine you chose sans old or new world products. You might end up malnourished or sick of it soon enough.)
I think we are all assuming pre-Columbian exchange here. No dairy for the New Worlders, no tomatoes for the Old Worlders. Decisions, decisions. As for your last point, that is why in my decision I took Chinese into account. There are enough variations there to keep me interested for quite a while, I assure you! 
I would sure miss french fries and ketchup, though. A burger just wouldn’t be the same…
Caulilflower?
Oh dear.
My two favorite foods are cauliflower and Diet Coke.
Decisions decisions.
New world means I can eat Corn Nuts with my Diet Coke. With a tomato chaser.
I’ll go new world. But I’ll resent it!