Dear Globalization: Thanks For The Edamame

Photo: iStockphoto

We took our visiting 12-year-old granddaughter out to dinner last night, and she insisted on ordering edamame, which I too love.  I discovered it at age 60 and would never have seen it in the U.S. at age 12 in 1955.  Earlier in the day, I had bought a cherimoya at the local grocery store. These examples illustrate an additional benefit of globalization — the import of new foods and, more important perhaps, information on and even local growing of different foods. Since there’s evidence that variety increases utility, this expansion is an additional, typically unacknowledged benefit of globalization. I wonder how many other foods simply did not exist in the U.S. 50 years ago?