“Why does our asparagus come from Peru?”

I read that question and paused to mentally scan all past asparagus labels I’ve seen at grocery stores. Yeah, why does most of our asparagus come from Peru?

Alan Beattie investigates this question in False Economy: a surprising economic history of the world. He writes, “it may strike you as odd that…a cost-effective industry spontaneously emerged to airlift a perishable green vegetable thousands of miles around the world from the remote western coast of Latin America.”

That does, in fact, strike me as odd. Is it because Peru has especially good soil for asparagus? A perfect sun angle? Trade secrets that no one else knows?

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