Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

One by one, starting in the 1940s, says Gianinni, canneries phased out. Freezing plants came in.

I don’t know when or where I first heard Woody Guthrie’s song “Pastures of Plenty” or who I heard sing it Maybe I heard a recording by the folksinging Weavers or Pete Seeger. Or, perhaps the only time I heard Seeger live, he splayed out his long, skinny legs, put his five-string banjo on his knee, and plucked his way through “Pastures of Plenty” ’s light, charming melody and sang:

I've worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes

Slept on the ground by the light of your moon

At the edge of your cities you will see us and then

We come with the dust and we’re gone with the wind

California, Arizona, I made all your crops

Then it’s north up to Oregon to harvest your hops

Pick the beets from your ground and the grapes from your vines

To set on your table your light sparkling wines.

In springtime, when grocers stack the first local asparagus spears into produce bins, “Pastures of Plenty,” whose narrator is a migrant worker, sings itself in my mind. The story the song tells tinges the astringent grassy taste that asparagus leaves on my tongue.

Asparagus is a lily family member. In addition to voluptuous flowering lilies and more homely leeks, garlic and onions, the family includes such oddballs as sarsaparilla, with which our grandparents’ generation flavored soft drinks; aspidistra, or cast-iron plant, ornament of Victorian parlors; squill, whose bulbs are a source of rat poison and a drug used as heart stimulant; meadow saffron, source of colchicine, a drug once used to treat rheumatism and gout; and aloe, several species of which are used to treat burns.

Asparagus officinalis, that we eat today, is the domesticated form of asparagi selvatici, or wild asparagus. A perennial plant that produces year after year from buds on a rooted crown beneath soil, the plant’s edible portion is a shoot, or, colloquially, a “spear.”

If you bring home a bunch of asparagus and examine a spear, you notice almost transparent triangular scales flattened against the stalk. These scales, botanically speaking, are not true leaves. Called phylloclades, they are undeveloped branches. The phylloclades give asparagus spears the appearance of an odd, prehistoric snack, a favorite treat of some waddling, 1000-pound lizard.

Asparagus spears would find tragic their presence on our kitchen counter. That the spears would dread suffocation beneath buttery hollandaise and tremble against our teeth would not be their despair’s source. It would be that we had frustrated their telos. The business of the asparagus plant is not to be eaten by you or me but to make food for its massive underground root system and to reproduce, to make more and more and more asparagus.

In temperate climates, asparagus goes through an annual cycle. Spears are harvested during spring months. As temperatures rise and cutting ends, growers “turn the field loose.” Spears grow to three- to six-foot-tall stems, with fernlike, leafy branches. The plant, through photosynthesis, collects food in its roots, a process that continues through summer and fall. In late fall, ferns dry and plants enter winter dormancy.

Asparagus is dioecious, with female and male reproductive organs borne on separate plants. After fern appears, tiny white or yellow flowers begin to bloom. Pollen is borne by wind and bees from male to female flowers. After fertilization, red berries, inside which are as many as six seeds, appear on female plants.

Because the female plant must dedicate energy to seed production, growers show favoritism toward male plants, which in many varieties produce more stalks per crown than do female. Seed breeders in recent years have bred varieties whose seeds yield all-male plants. UC-157, developed at the University of California at Davis and an asparagus variety much in use in California, produces more male than female plants.

Asparagus is an expensive crop. First, because of its perennial nature, it occupies the same acreage, all year, year after year. Head lettuce or carrots, however, come and go in 90 to 100 days; the farmer gets his carrots up and out and grows a second crop. Second, frequent cutting weakens the plant. Or, as one grower put it, “Every spear the root system throws up, trying to survive, you’re cutting off and selling. Add to that 30 or 40 or 50 days of getting knife wounds in the root system introduces disease organisms that over time can severely injure or even kill the plant.”

Third, asparagus is expensive to grow because, of all vegetable crops, asparagus is among the most labor-intensive. Fourth, because asparagus spears, once cut from the parent plant, have one of the highest respiration rates of any vegetable and this high rate means rapid decay, farmers must provide extensive shed systems near fields. Spears must have field heat removed and be refrigerated as soon as possible after harvest. Normally, within 24 to 36 hours after harvest, spears will have been washed, trimmed, packed in crates, cooled, and on the road or in the air.

Food historians confess ignorance as to when, precisely, asparagus was first domestically grown and where. They agree, however, that wild asparagus flourished across warmer parts of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, its snub green nose poking up out of dirt announcing its presence.

Egyptians tamed wild asparagus, planting its seeds in rows. They boiled and ate the spears and considered it such a wonder-working aphrodisiac that one imagines Cairo springtime lunches followed by long afternoons of luxurious toil atop silk sheets. The Egyptians also macerated the roots and stalks and used resulting powders as a sedative, as initiator of tardy menstrual periods, and as painkiller for toothache; made into paste, asparagus served as barrier against bee sting. Egyptian priests offered long green stalks to their gods as a propitiatory sacrifice, and asparagus spears appear on Egyptian funerary art.

The Greeks gave it the name by which we call it — asparagus. Lexicographers disagree, though, as to whether the word was derived from the Greek verb that means “to swell” or “to spark” or a noun for “tender vegetable shoot.” Those lexicographers who favor “to swell” as the root word for asparagus point to asparagus spears’ ability in optimal conditions (night temperatures no lower than 50 degrees and daytime temperatures between 80 and 90 degrees; sufficient water; loose, friable, rock-free soil) to grow in height as many as six to nine inches in 24 hours.

What written material remains from the last centuries B.C. and early centuries A.D. shows Romans much interested in asparagus. Cato (234 -149 B.C.), of whose many manuscripts only On Farming survives, gave directions for asparagus cultivation. The Roman general Lucullus (117-56 B.C.) led battles into Asia Minor, his victories enlarging Roman territory and his own personal wealth. The best library in Rome rested on shelves in Lucullus’s villa outside that city; gardens that encircled his villa at Tusculum, near Naples, were notorious for beauty and novelty. In his 60s, Lucullus retired and gave himself over to hosting banquets so lavish (flamingo tongues, locusts marinated in honey, and ostrich breast) that his name turned adjectival in “Lucullan,” meaning “lavish; luxurious.” Asparagus raised in his Tusculum gardens was among Lucullus’s favored vegetables; his fondness for its spears was recalled only recently in addition of his name to a new German all-male asparagus hybrid — “Lucullus.”

Asparagus was a sufficiently familiar part of then-contemporary culture that Augustus Caesar, founder of the Roman Empire, when he wanted something done speedily, ordered that “it be done in less time than it takes to cook asparagus.”

Apicius (25 B.C.-A.D. 37) accumulated a manuscript of recipes, some 468 of which have survived. These recipes make up what food historians consider the earliest extant cookbook. Among Apicius’s recipes are suggestions for preparing camel’s heels, dorice stuffed with pine kernels, and an asparagus frittata. Like Lucullus, Apicius was a generous host. He dissipated his fortune on feasts and, when threatened with bankruptcy, committed suicide by swallowing poison.

Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79), in his 37-volume encyclopedia A Natural History, indicates that Romans preferred their asparagus fat; three Roman spears weighed together, he wrote, added up to one pound. He disapproved efforts taken to coax large spears, given that “nature made asparagus grow wild for anyone to gather at random.” (Pliny recorded Apicius’s method of acquiring proper goose liver: Apicius force-fed his geese on figs.) Pliny had a day job as a high-ranking Roman civil servant. His 37 volumes’ accretion was made possible by a factotum who trailed Pliny wherever he went, reading to and taking dictation from him. History buffs, noting Pliny’s date of death, will recall that in A.D. 79. Mount Vesuvius erupted. Pliny died two days after that eruption, suffocated by sulfurous gasses rising out of the volcano’s cone.

Charlemagne (742-814) ordered asparagus cultivated in his vegetable gardens. During the Dark and Middle Ages, Europe’s monasteries not only preserved and copied Old World manuscripts; in these citadels monks also cultivated luxury fruits, herbs, vines, and vegetables. Monastery gardeners blanched asparagus; soil was banked against growing spears to shield stalks from sunlight. As further precaution against sunlight’s sparking the stalks’ photosynthetic pigment and despoiling its bridal white, this asparagus was cut before sunrise. The flavor of blanched asparagus, like that of blanched celery, was considered more delicate than that of unblanched green.

By the Renaissance, Northern Italy’s asparagus beds were famous across England, France, and Germany. In Ravenna, those three-spears-to-a-pound about which Pliny groused were the standard against which all but English gardeners judged their own asparagus; the English liked a skinnier spear.

John Bossewell in his 1572 Works of Armoury wrote that “some report that of ram’s horns buried, or hid in the ground, is brought from an herb, called asparagus, in English, sperage.” Richard Brome’s comedy The Sparagus Garden graced London’s 1640 theater season. The English called the spears “sparrowgrass.” Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary in 1667, “Brought with me from Fenchurch Street, a hundred of Sparrowgrass.” Asparagus was being grown outside Paris in Argenteuil by 1632. Argenteuil’s asparagus became such a favorite of French chefs that the name attached to dishes that include asparagus as a principal garnish, as in “poulet Argenteuil” or “agneau Argenteuil.” France’s Louis XIV, who ruled from 1643 to 1715, so desired asparagus that he demanded his gardeners grow it year-round. The Sun King’s intendant-general of orchards and vegetable gardens set about developing stove houses and hotbeds that kept asparagus available for any day Louis’s whim turned him toward it; Louis rewarded the intendant-general with land and a title.

Asparagus figures in Jane Austen’s Emma, Mr. Woodhouse ordering it served on triangles of toast set round a fricassee of sweetbread. Manet’s painting Une Botte d'asperges used as its model a bundle of asparagus that Monet’s wife Camille had acquired for dinner on an evening during which Manet was the Monets’ guest.

Marcel Proust described asparagus spears that he’d eaten as a child — “tinged with ultra-marine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet still stained a little by the soil of their garden bed.” Proust found the spears’ flavor so perfect that he forgave their “turning his chamber pot into a perfume-filled vase.”

The odor to which Proust refers is caused by the amino acid asparagine, which infuses urine with a pale green tint and peculiar odor. Asparagine breaks down in the body to a compound called methyl mercaptan, whose malodorous sulfur component set Proust’s nose twitching. According to Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, until 1980 researchers thought that excretion of methyl mercaptan after eating asparagus was a dominant genetic trait. If you had the particular gene, you were a “stinker.” But a recent study decided that all asparagus eaters excrete methyl mercaptan; it is the ability to detect its odor that varies from person to person.

Europeans brought asparagus to North America, where it grew readily along the East Coast and by 1750 was commonplace. Thomas Jefferson included asparagus in his garden and served it to guests. By 1852, asparagus cultivation had started in rich delta soils along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers east of San Francisco. Who brought the first asparagus to California remains a mystery. Stockton, California historian James Shebl, who nine years ago prepared an asparagus history as part of a booklet to be handed out at Stockton’s first annual asparagus festival, searched archives at the state library and at the University of California at Berkeley and at Davis for documents that would answer this question and found nothing.

At first, the California asparagus market was strictly fresh market and local in the Delta area. Then, in August 1900, a train carrying 20 carloads of canned asparagus started out from Terminous, near Stockton, headed toward the East Coast. More and more canneries were built and acreage given over to asparagus increased. By 1903, some 6000 acres were planted in asparagus in the San Joaquin-Sacramento delta region.

Vasco Gianinni’s 3-G’s brand is stamped on asparagus crates that arrive in Japan some 36 hours after asparagus is cut from his 400 acres outside Stockton. Gianinni, 75, was 12 when his father died. Gianinni dropped out of school and started running the asparagus ranch. “School of education,” he says, “for me, just forget it. School of hard knocks is what I went to.”

Delta asparagus — “We call it ‘grass,’ ” says Gianinni — was grown first by Portuguese and then Italians. The latter, says Gianinni, still dominate asparagus-growing in his area, with asparagus fields passing from fathers to sons. Although Gianinni still goes out to work every day, his son now runs the business.

Delta asparagus farmers, says Gianinni, “don’t irrigate, we flood. We close our drainage ditches in late November and let it flood like a river, and we keep water on the beds 25 or 30 days, all of December, then we drain it.”

You can make an asparagus field last 30 years, says Gianinni, “or, you could kill it off in five. It depends on what you do to them. If you don’t quit cutting it and let it go early to reestablish itself, you’re going to weaken it. But sometimes a guy needs money and the market is good, he’s gotta keep going. But fields don’t last long that way.” Back in the 1920s and 1930s, Gianinni says, there were some 40 canneries in the Stockton area and asparagus was picked over a 180-day season. “We used to start in January and sometimes we’d go clear to the Fourth of July because the cannery would be a little bit short.” In January and early February, traditionally rainy months, they would cut green asparagus for the Bay Area market. Then, when weather cleared and warmed up, soil would be banked against the asparagus to keep sun from hitting it. A week later, cutters could begin cutting white asparagus for canneries. “Then,” says Gianinni, “until the end of June we would cut white grass.”

One by one, starting in the 1940s, says Gianinni, canneries phased out. Freezing plants came in. By the 1960s almost all Delta asparagus was picked green and sold fresh or to commercial freezers.

“Today,” he says, “we only cut 85 days. The reason is Mexico. Mexico is coming in now [February] and if we came in, we would be bumping heads with Mexico. The prices would get depressed. Still, we got camps we have to maintain, wages, and we have more restrictions than Mexico does, so they have a big advantage over us. So we start in March and by the end of May we’re all through.

“Now we are going to Japan and Europe to sell our grass, but them people [the Japanese and Europeans] are smart compared to our government, because when their grass comes in, they cut us off. Why don’t we do that to Mexico? It’s because of politics we don’t.”

Gianinni likes selling to the Japanese. Not only are they willing to pay $10 per crate more than the average U.S. market price for air-delivered asparagus, but in addition, says Gianinni, “It’s also better than here because from Americans we have to wait 30-60 days for our money, but when Japanese buy asparagus they pay as soon as it’s inspected. No hee-haw. The money’s there.”

Stockton historian James Shebl notes that in Northern California, the Chinese first provided labor in asparagus fields, and after the Chinese came Japanese, then “Hindus” (only a minority of the India-born Indians were actually believers of Hinduism; one third were Muslim, and the majority were Sikhs. But Californians persisted in calling all these Indians “Hindus”), then Portuguese, then Filipinos, and then Mexicans. Although the French and Americans have put millions of dollars into research that would develop a mechanical asparagus harvester, no harvester has yet been found that can cut asparagus without destroying both the spears and the roots from which the spears spring. Technologists, Shebl concludes, “have yet to find a replacement for the skilled hands of the experienced Filipino.” Knives that asparagus cutters use are from 12 to 15 inches long, from blade tip to end of the handle. The blade is in the shape of an inverted V, whose corners tuck in to either side of the spear. Assuming that the cutter is right-handed, he grabs the spear at the top with his left hand, then jabs his blade into the ground and cuts the spear at a point about an inch below dirt’s surface.

David Filippini’s family has been making asparagus knives in Stockton for 50 years. Making asparagus knives was his father’s business for 30 years; David has been doing it for the last 20 years. He sells from 6000 to 9000 knives each year, at a price from $6.50 to $8.50, the lower figure for knives with plastic handles and the higher figure for those with wooden handles. “I sell some to growers down South,” says Filippini, explaining that by “down South” he means Southern California, “and some to South America and the rest to growers around here.”

Filippini starts, he says, “with a piece of high carbon steel; I forge it out into a blade and weld it onto a rod handle and temper and grind it. The handle itself is shaped like a pistol grip. The plastic handle is about eight inches long and the wooden one about six inches.”

Most cutters, says Filippini, “carry a sharpening stone with them, two-by-one-inch wide, and they’ll touch up the blade on that. They’re constantly sharpening in the field. They’ll cut a row and then stop and touch it up a little bit. Also, they’ll work on blades in the evenings when they get back in the camps. Most camps have a grinding stone, and guys’ll sharpen their knives on that.”

According to Filippini, about 75 percent of the growers supply knives to their cutters. “Some growers get the knives back and some don’t. But once the cutter gets the knife, he will customize it. If you see a stack of knives the cutters have used, you’ll see that almost no two knives are alike. A cutter will cut on the handle, change its angle this way or that to fit his hand. They’ll cut designs into them. Some pickers will have six or seven different knives. Some of them are real fanatics about their knives. Especially in the old days when most of the pickers were Filipinos, they used to come over here to my dad’s shop and sit all day making the handles a little bit longer or shorter. They’d be sharpening and retempering them.”

Chatting with California asparagus growers, one regularly hears that a mechanical asparagus picker with electronic eyes and off-scanners on individual blades has been developed. As asparagus scuttlebutt has it, the harvester was taken to UC Davis and tested and found able to successfully cut spears. But, the tale continues, “higher-ups” told UC Davis not to make the harvester available for general manufacture because its use would create such a problem in the asparagus economy and with the Mexican cutters who are now the principal workers in asparagus fields. At UC Davis no one whom I asked about the asparagus harvester claimed ever to have heard of it.

Conversation with asparagus growers also inevitably leads to talk of the good old days when most asparagus cutters were Filipino. Ronald Takaki writes in Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans that between 1910 and 1930 the Filipino population of California jumped from 5 to 30,470. The U.S. and Japan’s 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” restricted entry of Japanese into the U.S. The National Origins Act of 1924 effectively quelled Asian immigration and left West Coast farmers needing field workers. The 1924 Act, however, did not apply to Filipino immigrants because the Philippines was a U.S. territory.

The Spanish had ruled the Philippines for over 300 years and the Americans for 20. Filipinos, most of whom were Roman Catholic, had greater familiarity with Western culture than did other Asian immigrants. Those Filipinos who had been educated in post-Spanish-American War American schools in the islands tended to speak at least some English. All this made Filipinos particularly desirable immigrants.

Growers sent recruiters to the Philippines. These recruiters placed want ads in newspapers and, in small town squares, when the sun went down, showed films that painted a picture of the U.S. as an El Dorado where young Filipinos could go to school and better themselves. The men boarded steamships and landed in cities along the West Coast. So many Filipinos settled in the Delta area that Stockton’s Filipino population for several decades was the largest of any city outside of the Philippines.

What these immigrants found, according to Takaki, was not what films shown in their village squares promised. Some 60 percent of the men went to work in agriculture. Asparagus cutting was one of the hardest tasks and so fell to the newest immigrants. The rest found jobs as busboys and janitors. Almost none found time or money to go to school. White Americans taunted them as “goo-goos” and “monkeys.” Theaters, restaurants, barbershops closed doors against them. Laws barred their buying land or homes. California’s miscegenation laws, which remained in force until 1947, prevented their marrying Caucasians.

Few women came from the Philippines to the U.S. Men outnumbered women by 14 to 1. Lonely Filipinos sought companionship in dance halls, where a ten-cent ticket would buy one minute with a dancer. “The men,” writes Takaki,. “would blow a whole day’s wage in 10-20 minutes.”

As the Depression stripped more white men of employment and California filled up with more Okies and Arkies, resentment against Filipinos increased. This resentment expressed itself through violence — bombs thrown into Filipino labor camps, shootings, beatings.

Growers lowered wages in response to the Depression and Filipinos resisted. Between 1927 and 1943, Filipino workers went out on strike several dozen times. Again and again, growers threw them off their land and replaced them with other workers.

Whites, noting Filipinos’ attendance in dance halls, began to suggest Filipinos were a threat to white women and racial purity. Again, according to Takaki, in 1930 before the U.S. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization on Filipino immigration, a U.S. deputy labor commissioner testified, “The lovemaking of the Filipino is primitive, even heathenish...more elaborate.”

In 1934 the Tydings-McDuffie Act provided for the Philippines’ independence. The act limited Filipino immigration to 50 persons a year. After the U.S entered World War II in 1941, Filipinos, both here and in the Philippines, were drafted into the Army. U.S. employers needed to replace workers who had entered armed services. The U.S. turned to Mexico. The two governments forged an agreement in which braceros — laborers brought from Mexico under contract and returned home when their work was done — would pick U.S. crops.

Ask a grower even today why Filipinos became asparagus cutters, a typical answer is this: “I guess they just liked the work.” Or, “They were real crazy about cutting asparagus.” Ask why Filipinos made such good cutters, you might be told, “It was more their life than just their job.” Another answer: “Guys out in the field feel that the Mexicans who cut now seem put-upon and weary while the Filipinos came in the morning ready to work. There was no sense that the Filipinos felt they deserved better in life.” Yet another explanation: “It helps to be shorter, because the asparagus is only eight inches high and you have to bend over all the time. I haven’t seen a colored or black cutting asparagus ever. They are too tall, and if you’re too tall you have to bend over too far.” I ask one grower if he knows an older Filipino with whom I might talk about his days cutting asparagus. The grower doesn’t know any names. “I never knew any of them except by their face.”

“The Filipinos,” Vasco Gianinni says, “they were the champions. They were dependable, very reliable people. You’d very rarely see a Filipino drunk. They were very clean. We have these big bunkhouses for 40 men. They kept them spotless, like my wife’s kitchen floor. They would start early in the morning cutting and be done by afternoon. Maybe ten guys owned one car and they would go to town. They used to like these blondes. Around three o’clock in the afternoon downtown Stockton would be full of Filipinos.”

Today, 90 percent of the U.S. asparagus crop of some 250 million pounds comes from California, Washington, and Michigan. In 1993, California produced almost 90 million pounds of asparagus. More asparagus is grown in Northern than in Southern California, and it is grown chiefly for the fresh market.

Keith Mayberry, farm advisor for the University of California at the Holtville Agricultural Center in Holtville, about 140 miles east of San Diego and 15 miles from Mexicali, is Imperial Valley’s asparagus expert. As early as 1900, there were a few asparagus growers here; during the 1940s acreages began to increase. By 1992, 5216 acres in the Imperial Valley were planted in asparagus. Mayberry guesses that about a dozen producers in the valley now grow asparagus, each with four or five hundred acres, in multiple small acreages, planted in the crop.

Unlike the Delta farmer, who irrigates by flooding. Imperial Valley growers furrow irrigate with Colorado River water. “During cutting season,” says Mayberry, “they let water in to every other furrow.”

Cutting season for most producers starts in January and continues until the end of March. “A crew goes out and harvests about every third day and then it goes to every second day and as soon as it warms up it goes to every day.”

Like Vasco Gianinni in the Delta, Mayberry complains about foreign asparagus producers. “In the past we could come in with much higher prices in early winter. Now with imported product from virtually any part of the world, the highest prices that we used to get in the winter no longer exist.”

Allen Reames, an attorney and asparagus farmer in Desert Center, about 11 miles south of Eagle Mountain in Riverside County, came to asparagus through the jojoba (pronounced ho-HO-ba) bean. In 1971 when the Endangered Species Act banned United States’ import of sperm whale oil, the oil-yielding jojoba bean, which grew wild in the desert, suddenly took on glamor. Land prices doubled and tripled as speculators began buying up arid desert acreage near Bakersfield, Blythe, El Centro, and Desert Center.

Reames, who in 1975 was practicing law in the Bay Area, “got caught up,” he says, “in the jojoba craze and decided to come down here and become a jojoba farmer.” He was looking for a second crop to plant with jojoba and decided he’d try asparagus, the taste of which, at the time, he didn’t even like. Reames now has 175 desert acres planted in asparagus.

Reames says that as a youngster, he used to say to himself, “Boy, I would never want to be a farmer!” He had thought, he says, when he got involved with jojoba, to get his jojoba planted, hire someone to oversee its farming, and then go back up to the Bay Area and continue his law practice. “I hoped to come back down here in five years and have made a million. But after a year of spending the time in the desert and working in the fields, I went back to the Bay Area and didn’t like the life. I decided I’d rather come back here and farm full-time. I still practice law part of the time but not much. You live a whole lot longer farming than you do lawyering.”

Until Reames put in his first crowns in 1979, asparagus had not been grown commercially on desert land using drip irrigation. “Asparagus,” says Reames, “had never been grown under drip before. We were the pioneers. Now, the technology has been improved and it’s not uncommon in sandy soils to have asparagus irrigated by drip, which allows water and fertilizer to be applied directly in the root zone where the crown is.”

Reames starts harvesting after Christmas; volume is small until mid-January or early February when the weather warms. Reames’s picking season is over by the end of March, although some of his fellow farmers, he says, given that asparagus is a traditional Easter meal vegetable, will “try to hang on for the Easter business.” When you see an asparagus field ready for harvest, says Reames, what you see is an empty field. As temperatures rise, the snub-nosed stalks begin to emerge. “It’s not uncommon to see growth of six inches a day. Some days after they’ve cut the field early in the morning. I’ve been back out in the field in the late afternoon and I’ve come back to the packing sheds and criticized somebody for not cutting the field clean and they say, ‘No, we cut that field first thing this morning.’ That’s how fast asparagus can grow.”

Some of Reames’s cutters have been with him during all the 12 seasons during which his fields have produced asparagus. Most of the crew he uses, about half Filipino and half Mexican, come to Desert Center from Stockton and Salinas. In Imperial and Riverside counties, most asparagus crews are 98 percent Mexican.

Reames pays his cutters by the box. A top cutter can make $10 an hour, an average cutter will make over $6. I ask Reames if cutting asparagus is pretty hard work.

He answers. “For me it is.” And then adds, “It’s not heavy work, there’s a lot of bending. That’s one of the reasons I work so hard to get Filipinos. People say, ‘You can’t discriminate.’ And I say, ‘I’m not discriminating, those are the best asparagus cutters in the world.’

“If I can get Filipinos, they have a preference in hiring because of their skills. I was talking with the labor department one time, was in this guy’s office, and he said, ‘Why do you like Filipinos?’ ” Reames stops, explains to me that asparagus isn’t grown in the Philippines but that rice is, and then returns to his story of his visit to the labor department office. “I demonstrated graphically. I got up out of my chair and said, ‘Have you ever seen anyone plant rice?’ and I walked around his office showing him how you plant rice. Which is, you take something from your hand and bend over and put it in the ground and stand up and move and bend over and put another one in the ground and stand up.

“I said to him, ‘The way you pick asparagus is that you bend over, cut it, and put it in your hand, so it is exactly the same as planting rice, but in reverse.’

“So, you get a lot of movement in the back, but other than that I can’t say it’s hard work.

“Asparagus workers are almost a subclass in migrant workers. There are people who, for example, do very well on ladders in picking fruit and when they get that kind of skill then they tend to run around and pick things that grow up in trees. Asparagus workers tend to go, when there is no asparagus, into things like green onions and radishes. This type of product with an unusual shape like asparagus, like green onions or like radishes, takes a lot of handwork, so a person who is good at asparagus will generally be a good worker in onions or in radishes.”

Vasco Gianinni, who often cooks dinner for his wife and himself, makes essentially the same asparagus frittata that Apicius recommended 2000 years ago. “It’s really just an asparagus omelet,” says Gianinni. David Filippini, the asparagus knife-maker, likes asparagus prepared much the same way Thomas Jefferson did — steamed only long enough to make the spear tender to the tooth. Allen Reames sometimes eats it raw in the fields.

Apicius’s Asparagus Frittata (serves 4)

2 lbs. asparagus, skinny spears

5 eggs

1 T grated Pecorino cheese

1 handful of fresh parsley, minced salt and pepper to taste

Clean, boil, and chop the asparagus. Beat the eggs in a large bowl; mix in the grated cheese, parsley, salt, pepper, and asparagus. Cook this mixture like a frittata (or omelet) and serve hot.

From A Taste of Ancient Rome, by Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa; University of Chicago Press; 1992.