I currently live on a half-acre plot on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. I have seven chickens that provide me with a rainbow of eggs and a giant garden that produces hundreds of pounds of produce every year. This has been a source of inspiration for me in developing recipes, but this is not how you need to live to eat seasonally. Eating seasonally doesn’t have to be a grand leap where you immediately begin growing all your own food and give up your life in the city. It starts with baby steps. Something as simple as buying one piece of produce from the farmers’ market every week, or even strolling through one just to take it all in.
At first, you might wander around the open-air market nervously, feeling as though you don’t belong and you’re not quite sure what you’re doing there. There are so many stands, and some of them have the same things but also different things, and why is that? It’s not like that at the grocery store, where there’s one square of normal-looking eggplants and that’s it. It can be a little overwhelming. Then, a beautiful apple catches your eye. One that’s matte yet shimmers in the sunlight because of the gold freckles across its rough and swollen skin. It’s perfectly imperfect, and it’s unlike any apple you’ve seen before. This little apple lures you up to its stand, and you buy a couple of them. The stand owner is friendly, not at all pretentious or gruff. It is pleasant, and now you have these curious little apples.
You go home, you take a bite, and it’s the best apple you’ve ever had. You come back next week, but you can’t find that variety on the table anymore. You talk to the stand owner and learn that this year’s harvest from that particular ninety-year-old heirloom apple tree is finished for the season. You find yourself in a discussion about the orchard, and you end up buying several other apple varieties the owner recommends, take them home, and fall in love all over again. You come back the next week, and this time, you linger at some other stalls, too, going home with a wonky little winter squash in addition to your now-regular bag of apples. As the weeks progress, you see the market transform.
There are fewer people there in the winter, and the food that is on the tables has changed. You notice that the days are getting shorter, and shorter, and then longer again. You can’t find plums for the life of you, but there are persimmons, these little pale-orange orbs that have the most beautiful sage-green leaves. The stand owner is giving you their favorite recipe for persimmon jam, and you realize that you don’t need to buy plums in the middle of January, anyway. Every fruit or vegetable that you get there is fleeting and special and tastes better than any supermarket counterpart that you’ve had. You get to know the people behind the fold-out tables, how passionate they are about what they grow, and how they do it. You feel good about supporting community agriculture, and even better when you’re pulling a hot pan brimming with a local roasting chicken and heirloom potatoes from the market out of the oven. All you can think is that this must be what heaven smells like. Life is good, and eating like this is even better.
And then, one day, you’re walking the market as a part of your Saturday morning ritual, picking up eggs from your egg lady and mushrooms from the mushroom man—because you heard he has chanterelles, and you’ve decided that this year you’re finally going to try them—when something catches your eye. It’s a beautiful little apple, with gold freckles and a funny shape. It’s perfectly imperfect, and it reminds you of an apple you had once before a long time ago. You buy it. You take a bite, and it transports you back to that moment. That moment when all you cared about in the world was this apple that tasted unlike anything else you’d had before, this apple that opened your eyes and your mouth and your kitchen to a world of good food. This apple that started the first of many friendships. This apple that has taken ninety years of roots mixing with earth just to come into this world to feed you. This apple that’s dripping juice all down your chin in the middle of the market but you don’t even care because it is that good.
This is what eating seasonally is all about. It is about creating community. It is about respecting nature and letting it choose what time of year is best for eating a strawberry or a turnip. It is about building moments with food year after year, ones that you can look forward to and think back on when the calendar goes round again. It is about feeling the change of the seasons within you, and enjoying how your body begins to crave exactly what the earth is offering up to you at that precise moment. Most of all, though, it is about food. A love of food. Of sharing food, of good food, and, most of all, of eating food. The best food doesn’t come from the best cooks. The best food comes from the best people. People who love to eat.
I have listed some of the many reasons for eating seasonally below, and I hope that they, along with the rest of this book, encourage you to enjoy the awe-inspiring variety of foods that nature’s calendar provides us with each year.
It Tastes Better. When food is harvested out of season, it is picked when it is unripe and then is either gassed to ripen it artificially or expected to ripen during the shipping process. These fruits and vegetables lack the complex natural sugars and flavors that develop when food is allowed to ripen on the vine and continues to receive nutrients from the soil and sun through the plant’s circulation system, ensuring a delicious, nutritious, and flavor-packed food source. The contrast in flavor between an in-season, completely ripe tomato versus an out-of-season, rock-hard one is like eating two totally different types of food.
It Reduces Carbon Emissions. When food is shipped from faraway places, it needs to be transported on some kind of a vessel. Whether that be a ship, truck, or train, the transportation vehicle ends up emitting carbon dioxide into the air, and the longer the distance the food needs to travel, the greater the amount of polluting emissions. When you buy locally grown and sourced ingredients, though, you cut down on these transportation emissions considerably.
It Reduces Pollutants in the Water Supply. When you try to grow a plant outside of its normal growing season, you’re going against the plant’s naturally evolved defenses. All the defenses a pea has built up become useless if you try to grow it in a greenhouse in the winter. Growing a plant outside of its season makes it more vulnerable to diseases and pests, which means more pesticides and fungicides are needed to get it to produce . . . which means more chemicals leach into the soil . . . which then leaches into groundwater . . . which can then leach into local water supplies for humans, wild animals, and fish. Then, there are the adverse health effects that plague the farm workers due to daily exposure to these chemicals. You get the point.
It Supports Your Local Economy. When you buy directly from local farms, you’re supporting small businesses and families in your town. These local businesses pay taxes, which then go back into improving your local community and infrastructure.
It Looks Pretty. If none of the above are enough of a motivating factor to eat seasonally, just look at the rainbow of shapes, colors, and textures of apples at a farmers’ market in autumn. It’s insanely beautiful.