The Real Reason Celery Is So Expensive
Celery might not be everyone's favorite snack, but its incredibly low calorie content and comparatively great nutritional value make it a versatile vegetable that can be found in a wide variety of different dishes (via Live Science). As long as you remember to avoid the mistakes everyone makes with celery, it's of the best diet foods out there. Even if you're not all that bothered about calorie quotient, its seeds are also an important ingredient in the versatile and delicious celery salt, which is an essential ingredient in many high-calorie treats – like the famed Chicago-style hot dog.
Knowing all this, it's no surprise that when the price of celery goes up, almost everyone who enjoys food feels it in their wallets in at least some capacity. Unfortunately, this has indeed been going on in recent times ... but what, exactly, is causing it? Let's take a look at the real reason celery is so expensive these days.
Celery's rising popularity combined with difficult growing and shipping conditions increased prices
There are many reasons why celery's been getting pretty expensive, and as The Cold Wire tells us, they have much to do with the vegetable's popularity. Since it's a popular diet food and one of the key ingredients in the juicing trend, many people have been seeing the humble celery in a brand new light, and the increased demand has reflected on the price of the historically low-cost vegetable. All of this would be fine and well, if you could just grow celery wherever – which you absolutely can't since it needs a fairly dry, warm climate to thrive, and needs to be shipped in very specific conditions to make it to the stores in pristine condition. It's also fairly susceptible to weather, and cold and rain can severely affect the crops.
Combine celery's popularity with all these logistical and agricultural challenges, and per The Guardian, you may well end in a situation in which some corners of the world, like Australia – where veggie prices spiked in 2020 – have had to enjoy their celery at up to double the usual price. "As a percentage, we're looking at as much as double in some cases," Green Green Grocer's produce manager Matthew Broadbent described the Aussie situation. "Prices do go up and down at times, but I've never seen it like this before."