The Case for Eating Seasonal

Eating Seasonally, or emphasizing seasonal produce in your diet, means following the natural rhythms of plants in your meal planning. In spring you’d eat the foods that ripen in spring [think strawberries not pears], and hold off on fall foods [those pears] until, well, fall when they ripen. Sure, you can still find pears in the supermarket in spring, but chances are they were imported from halfway around the world, where the southern hemisphere is currently experiencing fall.

You consume fruits and vegetables as they ripen and are their greatest flavor and nutritional value. They also tend to travel shorter distances to reach you [and thus use up less gas to get to you] because they're not shipped from Chile in the dead of winter, for example, you're getting strawberries picked close to where you live in late spring when they naturally become abundant. Thus they stay on the vine longer before getting picked [due to shorter travel time], which means greater flavor and nutrition [funny how nutrition and environmentalism can be tied together, no?]

And, best of all, due to the funny principle of supply and demand, produce is cheapest when it is in season because there is more of it, and thus ... to do the healthy thing ... the environmental thing ... the tasty thing ... also happens to save you money.

What does eating seasonally look like? Here is a link that gives you a more complete list of which foods are most abundant what times of year.

Yes, this might mean that you can really only get strawberries for one or two short months out of the year, but oh, when you get them, they taste amazing. And once the strawberries leave, there are cherries, and then peaches and nectarines, watermelon and other melons, grapes, blueberries and blackberries, then apples and pears, then oranges and citrus, and next thing you know it is already March and you're anticipating strawberries again.

It is an opportunity to celebrate the bounty of each season in a way that showcases each flavor and texture, and generally increases variety in your diet by rounding out your palette, encouraging variety, allowing for creativity in preparing meals and searching for new recipes and food preparation methods that accommodate various produce.

Be adventurous! Who knows, you might just find a new favorite or two. This happened to me with kale and Swiss chard - I never tried them until I became reacquainted with a college friend who had slowly developed an interest in food and agriculture, and she introduced me to these two fine specimens. Now just ask my boyfriend, he thinks Swiss chard is my favorite vegetable. And while I'd take a ripe heirloom tomato any day, Swiss chard or kale comes a close second, especially in winter when there isn't a ripe, non-flavorless-pink tomato in sight ...