Asparagus output in 2005 shown as a percentage of the top producer (China – 5,906,000 tonnes).

Green: 100

Yellow: 10

Red: 1

The top asparagus importers (2004) were the United States (92,405 tonnes), followed by the European Union (external trade) (18,565 tonnes), and Japan (17,148 tonnes).

making it the world’s third largest producer, after China (5,906,000 tonnes) and Peru (206,030 tonnes).

The crop is significant enough in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta region that the city of Stockton holds a festival every year to celebrate it, as does the city of Hart, Michigan, complete with a parade and asparagus queen. The Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire is heralded as the largest producer within Northern Europe, celebrating like Stockton, with a week long festival every year involving auctions of the best crop and locals dressing up as spears of asparagus as part of the British Aparagus Festival.

The English word “asparagus” derives from clbumical Latin, but the plant was once known in English as sperage, from the Medieval Latin sparagus. This term itself derives from the Greek aspharagos or asparagos, and the Greek term originates from the Persian asparag, meaning “sprout” or “shoot”.

Asparagus was also corrupted in some places to “sparrow grbum”; indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary quotes John Walker as having written in 1791 that “Sparrow-grbum is so general that asparagus has an air of stiffness and pedantry”.

It is known in French and Dutch as asperge, in Italian as asparago (old Italian asparagio), in Portuguese as espargo hortense, in Spanish as espárrago, in German as Spargel, in Hungarian as spárga.

Following the consumption of asparagus, the urine of some people contains various sulfur-containing compounds, which produce a smell identified by some people. The prevalence of smell production and detection is debated.

History

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The effect of eating asparagus on the eater’s urine has long been observed:

“asparagus… affects the urine with a foetid smell (especially if cut when they are white) and therefore have been suspected by some physicians as not friendly to the kidneys; when they are older, and begin to ramify, they lose this quality; but then they are not so agreeable”[21]

Marcel Proust claimed that asparagus ”...transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.”

The volatile organic compounds responsible for the smell are identified as: