Asparagus is a flowering perennial that is native to the area where Europe and Asia overlap. The young shoots are harvested and eaten as vegetables. The green tips with the clusters of tiny developing branches are valued for their tenderness and taste. If you’re going to eat a raw spear, start at the pointy end because the stalk gets woody quickly. Young shoots are tender, but act now because stalks quickly grow to where they’re about as easy to eat as a #2 pencil.
China grows 8 million tons of asparagus a year, which is 90% of the world’s commercial crop. If you hate asparagus, it might be that you’ve eaten only woody slime that looks like it belongs in a scummy pond or on the steam table of a school cafeteria, boiled into submission and as limp as my typing teacher’s handshake.
A Closer Look at Asparagus
We know asparagus been around since the early days of the Greeks because they had a word for it
The Greek word aspharagos has changed so little over thousands of years that today’s spell checkers and auto-correctors change it to the word we use today: asparagus.
It was no direct lexical journey, though
The word began as ἀσφάραγος, and let’s see you spell-check that. The only place I found ἀσφάραγος was at Palaeolexicon. The site’s name means “old word,” and it calls itself a tool for the study of ancient languages. Along with Greek, you’ll find Early Proto-Albanian, Hittite, Linear B, Old Norse, Sanskrit, and dozens of others. All of the material on their site ignores folk etymologies and outdated views and reflects the current academic views, dependably and reliably.
Asparagus has two unrelated meanings
I’m sure we all recall the first written record from a passage in Homer’s Iliad. In that context, aspharagos meant throat (the outside part) and/or esophagus (the inside part). The second meaning refers to the edible shoots of asparagus acutifolius. That’s what scientists called it. Its street name was stone sperage.
Asparagus-Lover claims on its home page that the site is “Everything you ever wanted to know about asparagus”
Over-the-top claims like this cause thinking people to take pause, an action essential to the process of intentional reflection and serious consideration. It took less than a minute on their landing page for me to find something that indicated their work is unacceptably sloppy and therefore untrustworthy.
Asparagus-Lover cites the World of Wide Words as one of its sources of information
This sounds like a place that collects words with lots of letters, words that are synonyms of wide, and definitions such as “extending a great distance from one side to the other,” “opened as far as possible,” and “involving a large number of things.”
There is no World of Wide Words
The site they cite is called World Wide Words. It’s dedicated to the origins and histories of the English language and tells stories in more than 3,000 articles. I use it sometimes, mostly to identify inaccurate explanations.
Its name slid around through half a dozen versions
One of them was sperach (which sounds more like spinach to me) and another was sperage. The scientific community’s terms were largely ignored by regular folks, who began calling it sparrowgrass and sparagrass, the way sparrowgrass is pronounced in Mayberry, but not Mount Pilot. In time, sparrowgrass went from being a word associated with ignorant country folk to a word that the very uptight defined as vulgar dialect.
Benjamin Franklin wrote a Letter to the Royal Academy about Farting
He said he’d like to change the smell our urine takes on after we’ve eaten asparagus. Many people know that urine produced after eating asparagus has a very distinctive and unpleasant smell caused by sulfur byproducts.
Some think asparagus pee is manufactured only by those with a particular gene
Others believe all asparagus pee smells that way and only those with a particular gene can smell it. I was one of those who understood it to mean only some urine contains the very distinctive smell.
While taking a closer look, I learned I was wrong (yet again)
All asparagus eaters’ urine has a characteristic odor but more than half can’t smell it because of how 871 of their own genes are arranged. Their condition is called anosmia, known among non-scientists as the lack of ability to smell some things (Is the sweet smell of success one of them?). So the odor is always there but nearly half of all people can’t smell it. Seems weird, doesn’t it?
The oldest asparagus festival in the world has been celebrated in Worcestershire (yes, the sauce), England since 1935.
But that’s a long way off, so don’t miss Hart, Michigan’s National Asparagus Festival.It’s been held the second week in June for the past 53 years. This bit of Western Michigan calls itself The Asparagus Capital of the World. So does Stockton, California; Mullican Hill, New Jersey; Hadley, Massachusetts; Schwetzingen, Germany; and others, of course.
Don’t miss the asparagus-themed parades and the Taste of Asparagus Contest
People compete for best Asparagus Appetizer, Salad or Side, Main Dish, and yes, Best Dessert Prepared With Asparagus.
And make sure you’re there Friday night at the Oceana County, Michigan Fairgrounds for the annual crowning of a new asparagus queen.
My name is David Allan Van Nostrand
That’s me below, with my older sister in what seems to be a bunch of tiger lilies. I wrote this story and more than 500 other articles and columns posted here on letstakeacloserlook.com. Some are on the serious side, some show a glimmer of wit, and a few are eye-opening, but all are presentations of facts I was able to find during a couple of days of poking around.
I’ve investigated thousands of things big and small. What can I take a closer look at for you?
Bonus
Aspartame is an artificial sweetener. It’s made from a crystalline compound found in asparagus.
