But there are other structural barriers to food globalization:
- Protectionism: Countries like South Korea restrict the export of their Hanwoo cattle, with the beef almost entirely reserved for domestic consumption. Japan similarly banned the export of wagyu cows and sperm, and true Kobe beef is exported only in tiny quantities. Argentina works the other way around: its steak is so cheap domestically partly because the government has historically taxed and restricted beef exports to keep prices low.
- Health: Some cheeses which use raw milk cannot be legally imported to the USA because FDA laws ban the sale of raw-milk cheese aged for less than 60 days.
- Ethical Bans: Haggis, Scotland’s national dish, has been banned in the USA since 1971 because the USDA prohibits sheep lung in food. Many other delicacies like whale and shark are similarly banned.
- Danger (and pest control): There are fruits like India’s Alphonso mango, Blackcurrant and Jamaica’s ackee which, despite being beloved elsewhere, are largely unavailable in the USA. Fresh ackee is banned by the FDA because the fruit contains a dangerous toxin if improperly ripened. Indian mangoes are subjected to strict USDA irradiation or hot-water treatments to kill pests, which degrades the quality of the fruit.
- Economies of scale: Exotic foods common elsewhere, like camel’s milk, simply lack the baseline domestic demand to sustain a profitable import market in the US.
- Customs: Cuts of beef differ from one culture to the next. If a specific foreign cut doesn’t map onto standard American processing, it’s rarely imported because consumers don’t recognize it.
- Un-commodifiable goods: Then there are goods which cannot be industrialized like cloudberries (no ability to farm them at scale) or khat (it goes bad in a matter of hours after being picked).
