The exhibition Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture features a walk-through diorama depicting a bustling food market in the capital city of the Aztec Empire, in what's now Mexico. Set in the year 1519, the market gathered foods from all over the empire.
At the time diorama is set, Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés was about to enter the city for the first time, setting off an explosion of cultural exchange that would bring exciting new foods—including the birds we now associate with American Thanksgiving, as well as chocolate—to Europe, Asia, and Africa—and introduce others to the Americas.
What were some other foods sold at the Aztec Market? Though wild game, turkeys, fish, frogs, salamanders, iguanas, insects, insect eggs, and larvae could all be found in the great marketplace of Tlatelolco, in what is now Mexico City, the majority of foods for sale were plant-based; they included chayote, chile peppers, maize, and squashes.
The people living there had already bred many varieties of tomatoes, and they also used many parts of squash plants, from fruits to blossoms.
As for domesticated turkeys, starting in the early 1500s, explorers shipped them to Europe from North and Central America; especially in England, they quickly became a popular food for feast days, such as Christmas. But in Plymouth Colony in 1621, on the first official "Thanksgiving" celebrated there, English pilgrims didn't eat domesticated turkeys; according to documents from the time, they ate only wild fowl, perhaps including wild turkeys, but more likely wild ducks or geese.