Avocados, however, are a different story. They are a good that many Americans purchase regularly, and whose cost, therefore, they know intimately. While consumers can ignore abstract line charts about trade wars, they can’t ignore the price in the supermarket of their favorite fruit. Telling the stories about tariffs through everyday objects allows consumers to understand how such dense policies might impact them, and just might change the political calculus.
Sarah Anne CarterSarah Anne Carter teaches material culture in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is author of “Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World.”