How did asparagus, an icon of spring, go from seasonal treasure to year-round supermarket staple? Free trade and the war on drugs provide some clues.
There’s a Christmastime scene in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated coming-of-age drama The Holdovers, set in a fictional Massachusetts boarding school in the early 1970s, in which a group of students grumble over platters of chicken, potatoes, and vibrant, firm stalks of asparagus. It’s the setup for a joke as puerile as the schoolboys—the punchline being the slender green vegetable’s notorious ability to produce pee that smells like the mouth of hell.
initiated a whirlwind of market forces within agriculture, resulting in profound and enduring consequences for food systems and diets in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Rather than favoring domestic goods through tariffs on imports, the three nations opted for relatively unrestricted flow of goods across their borders, including many food products. It is one of the primary reasons that more than half of the fruit in the United States is now imported. Around 40 percent of vegetables in the United States are currently imported, and asparagus is one of the most common.
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