seasonality

i don't want to fixate on the book animal vegetable miracle, well maybe i do, but i can't resist bringing up one more topic. one of the aspects of the book i found most provocative is how natural the notion of eating seasonally is when you produce your own food, and how unnatural it is when you stroll the aisles of any modern supermarket. with the rise of global trade, food of all types is now available to us year round. we can get apples in june, blueberries in january, citrus in september, lettuce in december, watermelons in april....there is no order to the offerings in the produce section. the selection available feels random, or more appropriately, it feels full all the time.

most of us lost the ability to know when and where things grow a generation or more ago. i think the only vegetable the average person is even conscious of when the true growing season is, is the tomato. and this is because it seems to be universally acknowledged that home grown, height of summer, garden tomatoes are a completely other species (and a far superior one) to the lowly, pale, mushy creation we have available for purchase in the stores all winter and spring. the funny part is that i think the same comparison could be made for most produce and food we eat. it will taste better if it is picked when ripe and ready. and this means that to eat something ripe and ready you need to live where it was grown. connect these dots and you realize if you live in most parts of north america, you probably don't live where a lot of what you eat even grows. seen any banana trees on your street recently?

now i'm not a proponent of swearing off everything in your diet that isn't native to your area, but i think one of the most salient points kingsolver makes in animal vegetable miracle is that if we want to start eating more responsibly in the modern food chain, we all need to better embrace seasonality. eat things when they are at their prime, whether at a restaruant or at home, not when they have been trucked or flown in from half way across the world. this way we not only support our local growers and farmers, we are helping to limit the amount of fossil fuels it takes to produce and deliver food out of season.

so how are we supposed to know when something is in season? kingsolver came up with a cliff notes way to do this for all the non gardeners of the world--picture a season of foods coming from one single, imaginary plant. she calls it the vegetannual. i can't possibly explain it as eloquently as she, so here is the description lifted straight from page 64 of animal vegetable miracle:

"Take a minute to study this creation--an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer's warm sun, the fruits grow riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root.

So goes the year: First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, chard. (Here that is April and May.) Then mature heads of leaves and flower heads: cabbage, romaine, broccoli, and cauliflower (May-June). Then tender young fruit set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June) followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late July-August). Then the large, hard shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (August-September). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade."

i'm seeing the early spring vegetannual erupt in my own garden. i am knee deep in it with the shoots and leaves stage--lettuce, chard, spinach, arugula are all looking lovely (though my spinach has already gone to bolt) and have been delicious. i'm still waiting for the small green fruits to come on--the peas and the cauliflower specifically, but until then, i am going to try and focus in on these lovely leafy things and try to just exhale and wait for the next batch of things to come on. i think that in respect to food, the adage "all good things come to those who wait" really rings true.

Above images are of my water logged leafy green garden patch and image of the Vegetannual courtesy of animalvegetablemiracle.com