Groceries in this country are incredibly cheap. As cut-rate imports and big-box retailers beat down prices, we now spend a meagre nine per cent of our incomes on food. Even asparagus, once considered a seasonal luxury and priced accordingly, has become an affordable supermarket staple, most of it flown, shipped and trucked thousands of miles from Peru. In February, one pound of Peruvian costs as little as $1.99. So why do I continue to spend such a bundle on homegrown spears—$5 a pound at the Riverdale Farmers’ Market—each May?

It started with lunch at Osgoode Hall. Four years later, I can still taste them: fat, lush spears tossed with thick-leaved mâche in a straightforward dressing of shallots and wild leeks. A sprinkling of fleur de sel teased out the vegetable’s earthy flavour. The dish was a revelation. If it’s not impeccably fresh, fat asparagus can be woody. These sweet and tender things were anything but.

Before that, I preferred my spears pencil-thin: they were less likely to be tough after languishing in the produce section. Without realizing it, I had adapted my eating habits to a grocery trend: stale stalks from South America. An unlikely by-product of the war on drugs, Peru’s asparagus industry got a massive boost in 1991 when the first Bush administration eliminated a 21 per cent trade tariff on the crop to encourage coca leaf farmers to switch to vegetables. (No matter that coca grows inland and asparagus is a coastal crop.) Since then, our asparagus consumption has risen by nearly 50 per cent. In Ontario, we now import the vegetable year-round, even at the height of the local season. (In May 2005, we flew in almost as much Peruvian product as we did in all of 1990.) Meanwhile, our local yield—harvested for six or seven weeks in May and June—is growing at a much slower rate.

Homegrown spears, however, have a distinct advantage over imports. Asparagus demands to be eaten fresh, ideally within 24 hours; it begins converting its sugar stores to starch (and starts to toughen) the moment it’s cut. Some diehard foodies actually time their meals to coincide with the cutting of asparagus; when conditions are just right, stalks can grow a whopping 10 inches in 24 hours and a bed may need to be harvested three times a day.

“It’s a completely different way of eating asparagus, picking it straight out of the ground,” says Yasser Qahawish, chef at Osgoode Hall. Each season, he buys about 100 pounds of the vegetable a week directly from Bob Felhazi’s farm in Lisle, a small community south of Creemore. (He is such a fan of the veg, he also dug in six plants last summer in his own garden in Guelph.)