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meadows of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and has been introduced to most of the East- ern United States and Canada (where it is often listed as an invasive species). Whether you live in Alabama or Alberta, wild garlic is just waiting for you to come unearth it. GARLIC IN POLITICS & SOCIETY Like most products and ideas deeply woven into the fabric of our society, garlic has never been immune from politics. From the days of Ovid, through medieval England and into early 20th-century America, garlic was frequently treated by the upper class as a food that was beneath them due to its pungent, lingering smell, leading to the use of derogatory terms like “garlic eaters” and subsequent discrimination based on culinary choices. In Cervantes’s Don Quixote , for example, the wayward hero decries to his second- in-command, “Do not eat garlic or onions, for their smell will reveal that you are a peasant!” And in 1963’s The Joy of Cook- ing , the authors make a point to call out the rampant mid-century hypocrisy in suburban America surrounding the ingredient. “Garlic is perhaps the most controversial addition to

food…as our guests have sometimes been obviously relishing [it], unaware [they are] eating garlic while inveighing loudly against it,” write Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker. Even in Italy, Northern Italians have a sus- tained history of prejudice against Southern Italians’ use of the ingredient, specifically for the odor. “The disrepute heaped on gar- lic—and those who eat it—has its roots in the Italian peninsula, and it reflects the class and racial biases that undergird Italy’s long- simmering North/South tensions,” writes Rocco Marinaccio in his 2012 article, “Gar- lic Eaters”: Reform and Resistance a Tavola . “In this context, the reek of garlic particularly adheres to poor southerners, who made up the substantive majority of emigrants to the United States. The transference of region- ally based class tensions from the Italian peninsula to the United States during the era of mass European migration…thus pro- vided the grounds for a similar association of garlic with the lower orders to emerge in the United States.” In more recent years—as garlic has gone from stigmatized bulb to staple ingredient in most kitchens—the politics of garlic econom- ics and importation have taken center stage

in several high-profile, David-vs.-Goliath- style international battles. Perhaps most no- table is New Mexican garlic farmer Stanley Crawford’s journey, which was well docu- mented in his 2019 book, The Garlic Papers: A Small Garlic Farmer in the Age of Global Vampires . (There’s also a Netflix documen- tary, “Garlic Breath,” if that’s more your speed.) In 2014, Crawford questioned U.S. tariff exemptions for the country’s largest im- porter of Chinese garlic, setting off a years- long legal journey. By 2019—at least par- tially in response to pressures from Crawford and other small farmers—tariffs on Chinese garlic were hiked to 25%, leading to a sud- den, unexpected rush on American-grown versions of the odiferous bulbs. “This 25% tariff on inbound Chinese garlic has been a fantastic thing for American garlic farmers,” Ken Christopher of Christopher Ranch—the country’s largest garlic farm—told NPR’s Marketplace in 2020. GARLIC IN FOLKLORE Whether treated as divine or openly maligned, chances are that your great- grandparents had some pretty strong feelings, and perhaps superstitions, surrounding garlic.

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