The History of Asparagus — The Vegetable America Traded for Cocaine

In 2017, police in Lima, Peru raided a warehouse on the outskirts of the city and found two tons of cocaine sealed inside metal containers that were designed to look like canned asparagus. The shipment was bound for Belgium. Street value in Europe, $174 million. A Serbian national and four Peruvians were arrested, and the whole operation was being run through what looked like a legitimate gourmet food export business. Two SUVs, $75,000 in cash, and a Glock pistol were also seized in the raid. Now, cocaine hidden inside asparagus packaging sounds like the kind of detail a screenwriter would get laughed out of the room for pitching. But the real story behind how Peru became one of the biggest asparagus exporters on Earth is even stranger than that, because the United States government built Peru's asparagus industry on purpose, with taxpayer money, as a weapon in the war on drugs. The same policy designed to stop cocaine ended up creating the exact supply chain that cocaine traffickers later used to move their product across the Atlantic. And along the way, it wiped out an entire American farming industry that had been thriving for over a century. But this story does not start with cocaine or Cold War drug policy. It starts about 5,000 years ago, on the walls of an Egyptian tomb. The earliest known image of asparagus appears in an Egyptian frieze dating back roughly 3,000 years before the Common Era. Archaeologists found traces of the vegetable on dishware excavated from the like figs and melons. The Egyptians did not just eat asparagus. They considered it sacred. They used bundles of asparagus stalks as offerings in religious rituals to appease their gods. According to some accounts, Queen Nefertiti herself was particularly fond of it. This was not a casual side dish. This was a vegetable that pharaohs presented to the divine. The name comes from the ancient Persian word asparag, meaning sprout or shoot, which traveled through Greek and then Latin before eventually landing in English. Along the way, the English actually mangled it into sparrow grass for a couple of centuries, which is kind of charming if you think about it. And the vegetable picked up some interesting side jobs well beyond the dinner table. In ancient Greece, asparagus was considered a potent aphrodisiac. Brides in the region of Boeotia wore crowns woven from asparagus at their weddings. A tradition rooted in the belief that the plant's ability to produce tender fruit from rough thorns symbolized a sweet and gentle life emerging from a prickly beginning. The Greeks took this seriously enough to write about it in wedding customs that survived for generations. Over in ancient China, the tradition was different but equally respectful. Honored guests were greeted upon their arrival with an asparagus foot bath, which is either deeply considerate or deeply strange depending on how you feel about soaking your feet in vegetable water after a long journey. On the medicinal front, Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, prescribed asparagus for diarrhea and urinary problems around 400 BC. Another Greek physician named Dioscorides, writing in the 1st century, recommended asparagus root extracts for kidney issues, jaundice, and sciatica. The Latin species name for common asparagus, officinalis, literally means, of the dispensary, a direct reference to its long history as medicine. But the civilization that truly fell in love with asparagus was Rome. The Romans did not just eat it, they built entire logistics networks around it. Julius Caesar reportedly ate asparagus with melted butter, which honestly sounds like something you would order at a nice restaurant right now, 20 centuries later. Emperor Augustus took things to another level entirely. He is said to have commissioned a fleet of ships, sometimes called the asparagus fleet, specifically to transport the vegetable across the Roman Empire so it would always be available at the imperial table. When asparagus was out of season, the Romans would dry it for storage, and according to some accounts, they sent runners and fast chariots to retrieve batches frozen in the Alps for winter feasts. The oldest surviving recipe book in Western history, a text attributed to a Roman named Apicius, called De Re Coquinaria, includes instructions for preparing it. For about 500 years, asparagus was one of the most celebrated foods in the known world. Empires moved ships and chariots to deliver it, physicians prescribed it, priests offered it to gods. The Romans figured out how to dry it, freeze it, and ship it across continents. It was as close to a global commodity as any vegetable could get in the ancient world. And then Rome collapsed, and Europe basically forgot the whole thing. During the Middle Ages, asparagus retreated behind monastery walls. Monks kept cultivating small patches in their gardens, preserving the knowledge almost by accident, but the general population across medieval Europe had no idea what asparagus even was. A peasant in 12th-century France would have given you a blank look if you mentioned it. The vegetable that once traveled by imperial fleet across the Mediterranean was surviving in quiet obscurity, tended by hands that were more concerned with prayer and scripture than with cuisine. For roughly a thousand years, asparagus was invisible to ordinary people. Asparagus was rediscovered by European royalty in the 15 and 1600s. It showed up on the tables of aristocrats across France and Germany, but nobody was more obsessed with it than Louis XIV of France. The Sun King loved asparagus. He also loved peas, figs, pears, and strawberries, but asparagus had a special hold on him. He wanted it available year-round, which in the 1670s was an absurd demand. Asparagus is a seasonal crop. You harvest it in spring and early summer, and then it is gone until the following year. Growing it in December sounded about as realistic as growing oranges on the moon. So Louis hired a man named Jean-Baptiste de La Quintigne, a former lawyer who had abandoned his legal career after a trip to Italy ignited a passion for horticulture. In 1661, Louis gave La Quintigne the task of designing the Royal Kitchen Garden at Versailles. He was so pleased with the results that he invented a brand new title for the man, Director of All the Royal Fruit and Vegetable Gardens, a job that had literally never existed before. La Quintigne built the Potager du Roi, the King's Kitchen Garden, between 1678 and 1683. He started with a boggy piece of land near what locals called the Stinking Pond, not promising real estate, but La Quintigne constructed terraced enclosures with masonry walls that created sheltered microclimates within the garden. He pioneered early forcing techniques, using hotbeds of composting manure to generate heat and glazed frames to trap warmth. And he pulled off what the King wanted, asparagus in December, lettuce in January, strawberries at the end of March, peas in April. He raised 50 varieties of pears and 20 varieties of apples. He grew 16 types of lettuce. Not a single day went by when Louis forgot about his kitchen garden. The harvest was reportedly a regular topic of conversation at his dinner table, which he sat down to twice a day, and nobody at court could avoid hearing about what was growing and what was ready to pick. When Louis was away on military campaigns, he had baskets of produce shipped to him in the field, and he regularly sent pears from his favorite variety, the Williams-Bonn Chrétien, to other heads of state as diplomatic gifts, partly a gesture of friendship, partly a flex, a way of In 1687, Louis ennobled La Quintinie, who chose a coat of arms featuring a tree, two stars, and a chevron. The lawyer who abandoned his career after falling in love with Italian gardens had become French nobility, and his path there ran directly through an asparagus bed in December. French settlers carried asparagus to North America in the 1700s, but the crop did not gain serious commercial traction until the 1800s, and when it finally did, one tiny town became the unlikely center of the asparagus world. Hadley, Massachusetts, sits in the Connecticut River Valley, where rich alluvial soil deposited by centuries of river flooding creates some of the most fertile farmland in New England. Around 1910, a farmer named Ernest Page planted the first commercial asparagus fields in North Hadley, and the took off. By 1930, Hadley was producing nearly 80% of all asparagus grown in Massachusetts. The locals gave it a nickname, Hadley Grass, and by the 1940s, the town proudly called itself the Asparagus Capital of the World. The quality was so good that Hadley Asparagus was reportedly served to Queen Elizabeth II. The town built its entire cultural identity around the vegetable. They held an annual asparagus festival at the First Congregational Church, where the menu was buttered asparagus, baked ham, potato salad, and strawberry shortcake. That festival still happens today, drawing thousands of visitors each June. A local ice cream shop even started making asparagus ice cream, which is either brave or questionable, but Hadley was never the volume leader. That belonged to the western states. In Washington State, the asparagus industry boomed through the mid-20th century. A green giant cannery opened in Dayton, Washington, in 1934 after a 45-day construction blitz. Workers initially processed peas from the surrounding fields, then added asparagus in 1939. The company built a seed research department with its own greenhouse. The cannery became the economic engine of the entire town, and asparagus acreage spread across the region. Michigan was another heavyweight, eventually producing more than 20 million pounds per year. California and New Jersey rounded out the major producing states. By 1990, Washington State alone was harvesting 102 million pounds of asparagus from 30,000 acres. 250 growers worked the land. Asparagus farming was back-breaking work. Every spear had to be cut by hand, one at a time, stooped over in the fields during the narrow spring harvest window. Crews moved through the rows at dawn, making pass after pass as new spears pushed up from the crowns buried underground. It took physical conditioning to do the job, and years of experience to do it well, but the money was there, the buyers were lined up, and the families who ran these farms were planning to hand them down to their children. In Michigan, the numbers were similar. The state was producing over 20 million pounds annually, and the town of Hart hosted the National Asparagus Festival. Between Washington, Michigan, California, and New Jersey, the United States had a domestic asparagus supply chain that could feed the entire country. The infrastructure was massive, the knowledge was deep, and nobody was looking over their shoulder. The same crop that sustained these communities for generations was about to become the instrument of their collapse, and the decision was made 3,000 miles away, by people who had never set foot in an asparagus field. Through the 1980s, cocaine was pouring into the United States from South America. Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia were the primary source countries, and the crack epidemic was devastating American cities. Politicians faced enormous pressure to act, and the strategy that gained traction in Washington, D.C. was simple in concept. Go after the source. If you could convince Andean farmers to stop growing coca, the plant that cocaine is refined from, you could theoretically choke the supply before it ever reached American streets. In 1990, Congress passed the Andean Trade Preference Act, and it took effect the following year. The law gave farmers in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador duty-free access to the American market for legitimate agricultural products. On top of that, USAID started funneling agricultural expertise, seed research, and tens of millions of dollars per year in infrastructure funding directly to Peru. Congress later renewed and expanded the program in 2002 with the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, which opened duty-free access for over 5,600 crops and products. More than $1.2 billion in foreign goods entered the U.S. marketplace each year under these provisions. Along Peru's sandy Pacific coast, USAID scientists identified an asparagus seed variety that could flourish in the arid, sun-drenched conditions. They built irrigation systems in regions that had been barren desert. They paved roads. They trained farmers who had never grown asparagus before, and they opened the floodgates of the American market, zero tariffs, for everything those farmers could produce. Peru had advantages that Washington state could not touch. The coastal climate allowed year-round production instead of the narrow seasonal harvest window that American growers were stuck with. Labor costs were a fraction of what farmers in Washington or Michigan paid their field crews. The sun in coastal Peru was strong enough to grow asparagus 12 months a year, meaning Peruvian farms could ship fresh spears to American supermarkets even in the dead of winter when no domestic producer had anything to offer. And on top of all those natural advantages, the U.S. government was bankrolling the infrastructure that made it possible. Peru was not just competing with American farmers. Peru was competing with American farmers using roads, irrigation, and seed research that American taxpayers had funded. Alan Schreiber, the executive director of the Washington Asparagus Commission, later noted that asparagus crowns take several years to mature, so Peruvian farmers needed time to establish their fields and learn the techniques. The Washington market did not start feeling the pain until around 2002, but when the effects arrived, the collapse was swift. By 2005, major canneries had relocated their operations to Peru, taking Washington's entire asparagus canning industry with them in one stroke. The green giant operation that had anchored Dayton's economy for over 60 years was gone. Two other canneries in the region shuttered. Farmers plowed under asparagus fields that their families had planted and harvested for two and three generations. One grower who had planted asparagus in 1990, the exact same year the ATPA was signed, watched his market evaporate within 15 years. Schreiber described it as the most massive and significant industry collapse he had ever witnessed. Growers scrambled to find other crops, other buyers, other reasons to stay on their land. Some made it, many did not. The statistics are stark. In 1980, imported asparagus made up 10.8% of American consumption. By the year 2000, imports had climbed to 59%. By 2016, the number had reached 95.6%. Washington state went from 30,000 acres of asparagus to 4,400, from 250 growers to roughly 100. And then came the detail that turned the whole situation from unfortunate into absurd. Schreiber and other critics pointed out that coca is primarily grown in Peru's Andean highlands, while asparagus thrives at sea level on the Pacific coast. A 2015 map published by the Peruvian government showing hotspots for coca cultivation had almost no geographic overlap with asparagus growing areas. The farmers who switched to asparagus were, by and large, not the same farmers who had been growing coca. The crop substitution theory that justified the whole policy was operating in the wrong part of the country. If you are finding this useful, hit subscribe. I put out stories like this every week. While American asparagus farms were disappearing, something nobody had planned for was unfolding in Peru. The Aica Valley sits about 300 kilometers south of Lima. It is one of the driest inhabited places on earth, receiving less than 10 millimeters of rain each year. Every drop of water for farming comes from the Aica River and three underground aquifers beneath the valley floor. Between the early 1990s and 2013, asparagus acreage in the Aica Valley exploded from around 410 hectares to more than 10,000. Grapes expanded alongside it. By 2019, Aica alone was producing 45 percent of all Peruvian asparagus, generating roughly $250 million per year in export revenue. A combination of relaxed land ownership rules, low labor costs, and the trade agreements signed in the early 2000s had fueled a second wave of expansion on top of what USAID had already built. But asparagus is an extremely water-hungry crop, and the Aica Valley was pulling that water from aquifers that barely get replenished in a desert climate. By 2002, groundwater extraction had overtaken the natural recharge rate. The water table started falling. In some areas, it dropped by as much as 8 meters in a single year, which researchers flagged as one of the fastest rates of aquifer depletion recorded anywhere on the planet. Annual groundwater extraction spiked by roughly 150 percent between 2002 and 2009, tracking almost perfectly with the expansion of asparagus and grape cultivation. The UK charity Progressio investigated the crisis in 2010 and found devastating results. One large asparagus farm in the valley was using as much water per day as the entire city of Aica. Local smallholder farmers who had worked the valley for generations were watching their wells go dry. A farmer named Alvarez, whose family had farmed the Aica Valley for four generations, told researchers that his wells used to hit water at 55 meters and pump 60 liters per second. By the time of the study, he had to drill down to 108 meters and could only get 22 liters per second, even at that depth. The big agro-exporters had bought up water rights and acquired land from families like his. When the water ran out, the exporters would leave, but the families who had been there for generations would have nothing. And the total irrigated area in the valley dedicated to large-scale farming grew from about 7,800 hectares in 1990 to over 30,000 by 2017. The aquifer beneath the Aica Valley holds 40 percent of Peru's total groundwater resources. Some researchers warned that at current extraction rates, it could be functionally depleted within a decade. And then came the moment that closed the loop in the strangest way possible. That 2017 raid in Lima. Two tons of cocaine sealed inside metal containers designed to pass as canned asparagus, sitting in a warehouse operated by what appeared to be a legitimate food business, ready to ship to Belgium. The drug traffickers had studied the massive asparagus export infrastructure that the United States had spent hundreds of millions of dollars building over the previous two decades. They looked at the shipping routes, the canning facilities, the established trade channels flowing into European ports, and they saw opportunity. A country famous for exporting asparagus in cans was the perfect cover for moving cocaine in cans. The United States built Peru's asparagus industry to fight cocaine production. That industry gutted American asparagus farms from Washington to Michigan. It triggered a water crisis in one of the driest valleys in the Western Hemisphere. And then cocaine traffickers hijacked the very system that was supposed to replace them. You could not write this as fiction. Nobody would believe it. Now, the broader counter-narcotics picture was not entirely bleak. Coca acreage in Peru did fall nearly 70% from 1992 levels, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. So the overall effort to reduce coca production had real results, even if the mechanism was messier than anyone planned. And Peru's agricultural export economy boomed in ways that transformed the country. In 1990, Peru exported roughly $60 million worth of produce worldwide. More recently, that number reached something close to $7 billion. Peru became the world's biggest exporter of blueberries. It became a major player in avocados and grapes. Asparagus was the crop that started that entire transformation, the first domino that turned Peru's coastal desert into one of the most productive agricultural export zones on the planet. A Peruvian businessman named José Antonio Gómez Bazán grew up visiting the coast when it was nothing but sandy dunes. He left, studied, came back, and cold-called American distributors until he landed contracts with Costco, then Walmart, then Publix. That story repeated across hundreds of farms and dozens of crops. The economic transformation was real, even if it came with costs that nobody anticipated and consequences that nobody controlled. But the communities on both sides of this story paid real prices. In Dayton, Washington, the canneries that once employed hundreds of workers stand empty. Farming families that had grown asparagus for three generations switched to other crops or left the land entirely. In the Ica Valley, smallholders and local families face a future where the water they need for basic survival is being consumed by export farms growing a luxury vegetable for supermarkets in London, New York, and Tokyo. Today, Americans eat more than 500 million pounds of asparagus every year. 80 to 90 percent of it is imported, mostly from Mexico and Peru. U.S. Domestic production continues its slow, steady decline year after year with no sign of reversal. The surviving asparagus farms in Washington, Michigan, California, and New Jersey are holding on, run mostly by families who stayed out of stubbornness or love for the work rather than any realistic business calculation. The industry will almost certainly never recover to what it was at its 1990 peak. There are simply too many structural disadvantages now, and the trade agreements that created them show no sign of changing. And through all of this, asparagus itself just keeps doing what it has always done, what it has been doing for 5,000 years since the Egyptians carved it into their tomb walls. It shows up on dinner plates, and then it provokes the same conversation it has been provoking for centuries. In 1702, a French botanist named Louis Lemery wrote that asparagus causes, and I am paraphrasing slightly, a filthy and disagreeable smell in the urine, as everybody knows. In 1781, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels, noting that a few stems of asparagus eaten shall give our urine a disagreeable odor. Franklin was actually trying to convince the Academy to develop some kind of drug that would make bodily smells more pleasant, which might be the most Benjamin Franklin request in history. Marcel Proust, the French novelist, took the opposite view. He wrote that asparagus transforms his chamber pot into a flask of perfume. Scientists have since figured out that asparagusic acid, a compound found only in this one vegetable, breaks down in the body into sulfur compounds that cause the distinctive smell. It shows up within 15 minutes of eating asparagus, and whether you can smell it depends on your genes. Some people produce it but cannot detect it, others can smell it across the room. Five thousand years of human history. Pharaohs offered it to their gods. Caesar ate it with melted butter. A French king built a garden at Versailles so he could have it in December. American towns built their economies around it. The United States government used it as a tool to fight the cocaine trade, and drug cartels used it as camouflage to smuggle cocaine right back. After all of that, asparagus is still here, still growing, still showing up at the grocery store like nothing ever happened. If you enjoyed this one, drop a comment with the strangest food history fact you know, hit the like button, and subscribe so you do not miss the next deep dive.