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Eat seasonally, eat better.
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Do you see the strawberries hidden in this photo?
Confession: I ate some watermelon yesterday.
I’ve done worse, of course, and I’m certainly not going to confess those transgressions here, but there is something sort of deflating about eating food that is so completely out of season. Watermelon says “summer” the way asparagus announces spring, or persimmons autumn.
I could embark on a long sermon about the environmental reasons for eating seasonally, but I’ll spare you that today. Instead, I’ll appeal to your sense of taste and to your wallet. Foods picked for shipment to some destination thousands of miles away, needless to say, are not picked ripe. They’re picked while they’re still unripe and are often times prevented from ripening en route through chemical means. And then they’re encouraged to ripen through additional chemical means.
Food eaten in season – and I mean in season for wherever you live – are local, or pretty local, and are cheaper, healthier, and taste better. They don’t even need to be organic (More confessions: If I have to choose between organic and local, I’ll pick local). Buying in season means eating better food.
I live in California, where the year-round selection is pretty impressive, so when I discuss this with others inevitably they ask “Well, what about people in North Dakota?”
The National Resources Defense Council has put together a web site detailing not only the 50 states of the U.S., but fairly specific times of year, when various items are available. Let’s say you’re that hapless cook living in North Dakota and the idea of eating more frozen peas and a pint of $7 strawberries has left you at wit’s end. Not only does the site list what’s available from North Dakota right now at the end of October, it also offers suggestions from neighboring states such as Minnesota – and the selection from Minnesota is impressive.
Check it out.
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