It really is a great plant: Easy to grow even in bad soil, simple to harvest, full of starch, and easy to store without refrigeration. If you've got a sunny balcony and a big pot you can grow a fifty pounds a season, and you can start with potatoes you buy from the store.
While the Eastern hemisphere was breeding livestock the Western Hemisphere was breeding plants. (There's only one domesticatable animal in the Americas so they had some free time.) With that time they created potatoes, hot peppers, tomatoes, maize, squash, pineapples, peanuts, and many more.
Sorry, there are two domesticable species native to the Americas: Llamas and turkeys. (Three if you count alpacas.)
However, the strategy to getting meat was different in a lot of the Americas. They didn't want the big, stinky animals living nearby, so they'd manage habitats for wild animals. Then they'd go there to capture them.
This is also why explorers weren't hit that hard by disease. By not having much exposure to diseases from animals, there weren't that many the indigenous peoples could give to the Europeans, but the European livestock gave a lot of diseases back.
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