Have you noticed the idea of seasonal eating “cropping up” in lifestyle magazines and organic-themed publications? I find myself viewing the trend with the same strange feeling as when I read modern articles about off-grid living, or pasturing livestock.
Though these concepts are presented as new, they honestly couldn’t be more ancient.
As mislabeled as the current fad may be, the inclination is a good thing. Perhaps the current gravitation toward these lifestyle choices is a cry for a better way of living — one we’ve buried under takeout cartons, door-delivered burrito wrappers, and frozen pizza boxes.
Maybe it’s a subconscious rejection of the lives we’ve inherited; contrived, artificial, and disconnected from the cyclical, seasonal patterns found in the natural world. Or maybe it’s the realization that an artificially-ripened tomato in January tastes about as good as the cardboard it was shipped in.
无论你是出于什么原因阅读了这篇关于这个话题的文章,我希望能给你一些“思考的食物”,让你在考虑今年该吃些什么。
What Eating Seasonally Means
Seasonal eating is an incredibly simple concept. It is merely the act of eating vegetables when they’re naturally ripe and in season. But our modern, globalized world has made that a surprisingly hard thing to understand or see in our standard grocery stores.
By the artificial might ofcalcium carbide and ethephon, across-the-ocean shipping, and industrialized greenhouses, the cook who demands a fresh strawberry can have it, any time, any season. That doesn’t necessarily mean the strawberry tastes good, or carries its full potential nutritional benefits, but the strawberry now exists, year-round. Likewise, the rest of the produce in your grocery story may have come from hundreds of miles away, or may have even been harvested a year ago. It’s hard to know.
时令饮食是一种回归简单饮食方式的尝试——当天然找不到草莓时,不需要或不需要草莓。相反,季节性饮食者喜欢天然的食物。因此,任何天然可得的食物都与食客的种植区和当地农场有关,这意味着没有适合季节性食客的通用饮食。相反,饮食是由我们生活的土地个性化和定制的。
How Does Eating Seasonally Make a Difference?
Frankly, the answer to this one can go as shallow or as deep as you want to take it.
On the surface, eating food in season allows you to enjoy the peak nutrition and flavor of food harvested when it was ready, and at the time it typically wants to be ripe. Vegetables harvested in the season they’re designed to grow will have naturally ripened, or at least, be a whole deal fresher and tastier than something shipped in from who-knows-where, who-knows-when, and forced to ripen through artificial means.
Seasonal eating also supports local farms and farmers, especially if you buy from them directly. That practice bolsters your local economy and gets you connected with real food in your community, rather than the personality-less bag-o-stuff at the megamart.
Seasonal eating, however, is far more than that. It’s a return to a diet that is, in my opinion, more based in reality. Throughout all of time (well, until relatively recently when globalization and refrigeration changed things up) there weren’t really choices when it came to what food was available. Strawberries came in the spring. Pokeweed sprouted in early summer. Squash ripened in the early fall. Eggs weren’t laid in the winter. The only way to eat foods beyond the day they were plucked from their stems was to ferment, dry, salt, or store them in underground pits. If you wanted a fresh, ripe strawberry mid-January, too bad. There weren’t any.
But as negative as this sounds at first, I actually think it’s a good thing. Eating vegetables in season creates a tasty pattern to the year that creates seasons of plates along with the seasons outside. The traditional pairings of flavors suddenly make perfect sense as you prepare early spring salads, midsummer shakshuka, autumn roast corn, or comforting baked squashes and roots for the winter dinner table. And if you grow your own food, you’ll also be privy to the most ephemeral of offerings that are impossible to ship to most grocery stores: garlic scapes, radish seed pods, vine-ripened tomatoes, or corn ten minutes off the plant.
This cultivates a renewed appreciation for foods as they become available, rather than the dullness that comes from having everything at your fingertips at all times. It even sprouts gratitude, where there otherwise might have been none. I know it may sound fluffy to advocate for gratitude and appreciation of vegetables, but those seasonal attributes make folks relish eating them, treasure their presence at the table, and take care not to waste them after waiting so long.
I would even argue that the endless availability of all foods has bred a thoughtless indifference in much of the industrialized world to food in general. Since the presence of a full spectrum of vegetables is assumed, it’s easy to slide into the mentality that allows large-scale food waste and a culture that is generally fine with pushing the broccoli to the side of the plate.
Getting Started With Seasonal Eating
1. Learn How to Cook
You need to know how to cook your own meals. Even if you feel like you’re all thumbs at the stove, there’s no better time to refine your skills and pick up techniques than today. Stir-fry, roasting, and stewing aren’t hard, and finding simple, achievable recipes will help you build confidence. There are endless recipes and tutorials online for learning how to become an excellent home cook.
2. Connect With the Land
你需要与土地相连。事实是,无论你在这个话题上做了多少研究,无论你多么相信季节性饮食是一种生活方式,在你有了土地之前,季节性饮食只是一个毫无根据的抽象概念。You can try to buy seasonally, you can visit excellent, informative websites likeThe Seasonal Food Guideto start learning what grows when, but it is largely an artificial construct.
Unless you have some encyclopedic knowledge of garden vegetables, eating seasonally will forever be a research endeavor. But once you have ties to some bit of land that is growing food, you won’t need to look up when a tomato is naturally ripe or when a cucumber is ready to pick — it will be there, in front of your face, silently declaring it is ready to be eaten. Seasonal eating will make sense naturally. The way it has for centuries.
One of the most obvious ways to build this relationship is to grow a garden. I don’t care what size — even a windowsill salad box. Getting your hands in the earth and planting seeds forces you to pay attention, learn, react, and understand the cyclical patterns of plant growth. Squash refuses to sprout in early spring. Sweet peas shrivel under the hottest summer sun. The way the vegetables you grow react to the seasons will start to give you cues to when they’re best to eat.
Foraging is another fantastic way to start developing an attitude for eating what is available in your location. Even if you only have a little suburban backyard, observing what is growing and when, will develop an awareness that no book can impart. We have a huge array offoraging articlesandvideosavailable here at Insteading, if you’re interested in learning more.
Going to your local farmers market is another way you can start getting a sense of what grows when. This option can be limited depending on the variety at your local market, though. If you’re willing to ask questions and take the time to listen, you’ll be sure to meet lots of farmers who can teach you what they know, who offer vegetables and fruits you’ve never seen in a store, and who have ties to the land they can share with you.
Getting connected with a local CSAor urban garden program can also give you a patch of earth to know, even if you currently live in an apartment or dorm. There are abundant opportunities for those willing to look.
3. Take It One Day at a Time
The third element is to take it slow and really dig into the process of learning. Reconnecting with the land in such a visceral way can be a delightful journey of rediscovery, but it will only stay so if it doesn’t become some sort of guilt-ridden, knowledge dump of impossible proportions. Start by getting to know your favorite foods better, then branch out and continue expanding your repertoire season by season. Eventually, your familiarity will grow, become instinctive, and embed itself in your understanding. This process takes time. Let that time be taken, and enjoy the ride.
Sample Menus From a Midwestern, Zone 6 Homestead
These meal ideas are totally connected to my patch of earth, which means they may be somewhat frustrating for anyone who doesn’t住在第6区。尽管如此,我还是希望它们能成为那些想要看看实际生活是什么样子的人的一个鼓舞人心的触点。如果你决定尝试以一种更应季的方式吃饭,你就会与你居住的地方有联系,同样地,可能会想出一个完全不同的,但同样个性化的菜单项目系列。
Spring Seasonal Cooking
This is the time for radishes, lettuce, fava beans, and peas. Foraging will give you violet leaves, hairy bittercress, tender dandelion and chicory leaves,field garlic, and lots of edible flowers. At mid-spring,pokeweedshoots start to become available. And as the spring finale,wild strawberrieswill be ripe for the picking as the weather begins to warm. Your chickens will start laying eggs again, too.
Possible Spring Menu
- Breakfast:Radish greens and roots sauteed with garlic leaves, served with fried eggs
- Lunch:Pokeweed greensorgreens fritters, served with cornbread
- Dinner:Garlic scapes and peas, sauteed with butter and fresh herbs, served over whole-wheat gnocchi and topped with canned tomato sauce and cheese
Summer Seasonal Cooking
这是在明火上烤面饼,享受菜园里第一次收获的季节。山羊应该会产出充足的奶水,它们的孩子现在在旁边嬉闹。草本植物的叶子应该长得很漂亮,西红柿终于开始变红,黄瓜像绿色的宝石一样晃来晃去。你现在可能也在鸡蛋里游泳了!Additionally,brambleberries are in abundance. Now is a great time to pick as many as possible and preserve them for the winter.
Possible Summer Menu
- Breakfast:Shakshuka made from fresh tomatoes, eggplant, herbs, and chicken eggs, served with fresh flatbread
- Lunch:Israeli salad还有鹰嘴豆泥,配烤面饼
- Dinner:Saag pannermade with foraged and garden greens (often Swiss chard, beet greens, and wild spinach are available now), paneer made with goat milk, served with brown rice
Fall Seasonal Cooking
秋收时节,厨房里一片忙碌。霜冻威胁着夏天所有的植物,你采摘所有能找到的,即使它还没有完全成熟。有很多秋葵、青番茄、南瓜、茄子和辣椒,可以装满篮子和罐头罐里。Acorns begin to drop, an abundant harvest that nobody planted but many can benefit from. It’s time to dig potatoes, too, before the voles get them. All the perfect roots go into storage, but there’s going to be the inevitable damaged ones that the shovel nicked or the vole nibbled. Though they can’t be stored, they’re not wasted … if they’re that night’s dinner!
Possible Fall Menu
- Breakfast:Acorn pancakes
- Lunch:Stir-fry vegetables (try okra, peppers, eggplant, onions, and carrots), served with rice
- Dinner:Roasted damaged potatoes, turnips, beets, parsnips, and carrots, served with the sauteed green tops of the carrots, beets, and turnips and drizzled with a balsamic reduction
Winter Seasonal Cooking
烧了一整天的柴炉,现在是时候在炽热的表面上做慢炖菜了。This is a great timeto cook that fall-butchered poultry as a savory stew,combined with the potatoes, carrots, onions, parsnips, sunchokes, and turnips that have been secreted away in storage for winter. It is also a season for lots and lots of sourdough bread baking — heat from the oven keeps the kitchen cozy.
Possible Winter Menu
- Breakfast:Whole grain porridge made of wheat, rye, acorns, and cornmeal, topped with thawed wild berries on special days
- Lunch:Root vegetable soup with chicken gizzards and hearts, served with croutons made from yesterday’s leftover bread
- Dinner:Roasted pumpkin and pumpkin seeds,fresh sourdough breadwith butter or olive oil, braised cabbage and onions
I’m all for enjoying the proverbial strawberry that I’ve used as a metaphor throughout this article. But I hope you can join me in waiting for them to ripen on the plant, and then, in the most perfect of sun-soaked moments, eating them as fresh as can be.
We would love to hear seasonal eating stories and recipes from you. What seasonal treats have you discovered in your local area? What are some traditional dishes that you enjoy that are made from in-season vegetables? And how do you get local dirt beneath your fingernails? Let us know below!
Leave a Reply