The importance of Indian agricultural products, namely spices, for inciting the European outreach to Asia in the late 15th century has been widely recognized. So has been the impact of this outreach on European naturalist and ethnographic knowledge about India since the 16th century. This paper investigates the entanglement of European naturalist and ethnographic knowledge about the effects of Indian food on modes of othering in the period since the late 15th century to the beginning of large-scale colonialism. During the late Middle Ages, Europeans assumed that the origin of Indian plants, especially spices, was connected to the biblical Garden Eden. Such assumptions created an allusion of a salvific link between Indian and European people through the consumption of such plants. By the end of the 17th century, such allusions had been replaced by more ‘scientific’ ones. The European scholarly community now assumed that the effect of an Indian or a European soil had a direct effect on its agricultural products and on their consumers. Eating food grown in a particular area was considered to imbue the consumers’ bodies with the properties of the same area. Thus, such scholars argued, larger populations would develop permanent and diverging physical characteristics, implicitly creating racialized body types of Indians and Europeans. Hence, medieval religious notions were replaced by an emphasis on observational methods in the European modes of describing the food effects. The racialization of food began to be described in ‘scientific’ manners, based on a proposed empirical objectivity. I will argue that the scientific racialization of the effects of Indian foods was rooted in older modes of othering based on the intersection of naturalist and ethnographic knowledge.