In the early 17th century, European settlers brought asparagus to the shores of North America, introducing it alongside so many other plants, animals, and diseases to the fertile soils of this continent. By the 19th century, commercial cultivation began in earnest, particularly in California and the Midwest, where the climate and soil conditions proved especially favorable for its growth. Asparagus soon became a spring staple in American cuisine, featured in cookbooks such as Fannie Farmer’s famed 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, which contains recipes for asparagus on toast, in soup, in salad, with white sauce, à la Hollandaise, and simply boiled.
Into the latter half of the 20th century, asparagus remained one of those seasonal delights whose delightfulness is deeply tied to its limited window of availability—like the first corn of summer, globed pumpkins in autumn, and sweet clementines in winter. Depending where in North America you were, asparagus season would vary, roughly between early March (in warmer areas like California) to early May (as in Michigan, which remains the largest domestic producer of asparagus). But soon, that critical balance between seasons, humans, and the foods they eat would drastically change.
Imports take off
Toward the end of the 20th century, food in the United States underwent a fundamental transformation thanks to improvements in transport, logistics, and agricultural science—but also in large part due to trade liberalization agreements, the most famous of which was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which President Clinton signed into law in 1993. NAFTA 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 NAFTA 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. According to USDA data, there were virtually zero imports of asparagus in 1970—back when The Holdovers was set—but the numbers started to tick up in the middle part of that decade and into the 1980s, before hockey-sticking in the 1990s. In 1990, we imported 43.8 million pounds of fresh asparagus; by 1999, that figure had more than tripled. Between 2000 and 2010, imports doubled in volume again, hitting 361 million pounds. Of course, the American population also grew rapidly during those 40 years, but so did per capita consumption of asparagus, nearly doubling in that time period. With more asparagus at the supermarket, and now available year-round, more people ate more asparagus. By the mid-1990s, the United States was importing more asparagus than any other country in the world, and by 2007, it imported more asparagus than the next five largest importing countries combined. At the same time, domestic production of fresh asparagus and asparagus exports both collapsed, shrinking by more than half between 1990 and 2010.