After having every fruit and vegetable imaginable at your local grocery, do you think you could or even would shop at a market that only offered fruits and vegetables that were in season? What if that was the only available option? What if you could make your diet more secure and sustainable by eating seasonally, opting for foods that are grown closer to home without the added carbon footprint of greenhouses and transportation? Would you be in?
Currently, the supermarket model is one that may be difficult to sustain. Recently, this became apparent when the UK experienced shortages of lettuce, zucchini, spinach, and other green vegetables after severe flooding in Spain. Because they couldn’t import those items from their normal sources, they took a hit and brought that produce in at a loss. Because that’s what was expected.
But what if we changed the model? What if our supermarkets began only offering local produce in season? Can you image the global implications? The reduction of the carbon footprint? The billions saved transportation costs? Just on a local level, it would help to support local farmers who struggle to make a living.
In order to shift the supermarket model, we’d have to shift how we eat. We could no longer expect to eat cucumbers, Romaine lettuce, and cherry tomatos in the middle of winter; we’d have to be okay with winter produce and only winter produce until other yummy foods come back into season. Then we would stuff our faces and begin to preserve all our new bounty.
Do you think a store like this could really make it in today’s “I want what I want when I want it” society? Would you shop there? Or would you miss your off-season produce too much?
Let me know all you produce eaters!
~Mavis
Mrs. C. says
Mavis, you do realize this means you may have to eat kale and chard?
Jenny Young says
I’d have a very hard time. We eat low/no carb salads once or twice a day year round. But I think I could be happy with drained, diced, canned tomatoes on my salads & spinach for greens…it would be hard to do without Romaine.
I try growing some things myself & have pretty much decided this year not to grow anything except a few tomatoes on my screened porch. I only harvested two cherry tomatoes last summer between the deer & the squirrels…& I have a big guard dog running loose around my raised beds 24/7.
Donna says
We have one in our town. Very small store, though. Only sell local, organic, seasonal produce. They also sell local honey, milk, meat and cheese. I love it!
Crystal says
Some things simply don’t grow locally at any season. Are you suggesting that us in the Pacific Northwest here shouldn’t eat oranges ever again because they can’t be grown here in any season? It isn’t that I have a problem with eating more seasonally- more that eating local only severely limits quite a few foods.
Tammy says
It’s called the Farmer’s Market. 😀
I love buying food in season. Am I perfect at it? of course not! But I do not buy cherries and watermelon and strawberries in December, because that is just ridiculous. But I guess it might be just as ridiculous to buy lettuce out of season.
I don’t have a problem buying apples out of season, they store so well that they are stored well beyond their “season” if that makes sense.
Andrea says
My thinking, too, Tammy – Farmer’s Markets sell locally and seasonally.
Stephanie says
My thoughts exactly!
Darla says
I don’t think I could go back to that way of eating. As a child I remember the only fruit we had in winter was apples, sometimes oranges shipped in from Florida. Tangerines at Christmas were a big deal. Dad would get grapes occasionally in his lunch box, but they were too sour and too expensive for kids. In summer we went crazy over the berries, peaches and watermelon which are still my favorite fruits.
Robyn says
I would absolutely do it and try to be conscious of it when I shop now. I’ve been involved in issues around local food self reliance since the 70s-back when we first began to see the growth in transnational big Agra. I believe we’re reaching the tipping point of eating what we want when we want for a variety of reasons, one being climate change, another the decrease in net energy production. We will see a return to local and sustainable whether we like it or not so better to learn to live with and enjoy less of everything while we have a choice.
Just sayin!
Robin says
I feel the pain of the people in the UK. I went to my local Safeway to get strawberries only to find out that with the flooding in California, they could not get any from the regular source and were trying to get them elsewhere.
I don’t think the seasonal market would probably fly. You said it perfectly, too many people want what they want when they want it. I personally grow a LOT of my own food, preserve, dehydrate. As for the carbon footprint of a greenhouse, not quite sure what you are referring to, but we have a great local farmers market that has fresh greens in the winter grown in a hoop house. You can’t get much more local than that and still have fresh greens in the winter in Colorado. Your article is a great idea though. Maybe its time is coming.
Jessica says
Where I live (central Canada) nothing grows here at all for a good 6 months, so we’d be pretty much down to anything that could be stored. I would figure it out if necessary by preserving more, and I’ve been trying to figure out a good indoor garden system to grow some greens/cherry tomatoes, but so far I’m not having a lot of success. (I may need to switch to small scale hydroponics or something)
Mainly the prices are what push me into my stored veggies, but if I couldn’t get anything else, I could put away enough to keep us happy and fed for the winter. (Though I’d be super happy when the summer fruits start up each year)
Mrs. C. says
What’s in season varies all over the country. So, you have citrus, tomatoes, etc., growing in southern regions when other folks are under 3 feet of snow. If those farmers could not send what they grow to colder regions, they would go out of business. It seems to me that this local/in season niche is already filled by farmers markets.
Cheri says
I think this would be hard, since many wintery recipes use off-season ingredients. However, I think it would a wonderful change that I would be more than willing to make the struggle to adjust to.
Cheri says
After reading the comments above, I have to agree about the way regions have different growing seasons. I would not want to hurt farmers because they couldn’t send oranges, and I want oranges. I think maybe I wouldn’t mind any produce grown in the U.S. off-season, as long as that produce is in tune with its own growing season and not forced. I’d rather not see produce grown in Mexico or other countries, though, unless it’s tropical fruits like bananas that we don’t grow in the U.S.
Stacie says
I 100% agree with you on having more US grown produce in our stores!! It would be wonderful to support our own farmers more.
Mary Elizabeth Tait says
I live in California so we have access to a nice variety of produce year round that is grown in state. I don’t buy anything stamped Chile in the produce department. …sending rock hard peaches all the way from Chile seems crazy to me. We have a lot of local citrus and realized one day that the oranges in the store were from Australia. ….I did not buy them.
Lisa Millar says
That made me smile! (I am in Aust) I have done the same thing when I realised the oranges were from the US!! So many people WANT to buy what was grown in their own country as much as possible.
Diana says
I make an effort to eat local and seasonal. I grow a lot of my own food, and buy most of the balance from local suppliers. There is a produce market that supplies all the restaurants about 20 minutes away, I go there every other week to stock up. However I will admit I live in San Diego, so there is a wide range of products available. Food that is fresh has much more nutritional value and the flavor is off the chart. Supermarkets stock varieties that store the best, not the best tasting. You know how a fresh grown tomato tastes so much better than store bought? I have found that is true with most items, try fresh and local when you can, it is the best!
Diana says
we used to do this when I was a child until 20 years ago. When you eat seasonally you really experience the joy of the first tomato or cucumber of the year. Now, I am not able to feel that joy even if I decide not to buy things that are out of season. The magic is gone……..
Mavis Butterfield says
I agree.
Marcia says
It’s funny because that was mostly the norm for me growing up in the 70s. We had a garden. In the winter (the northeast), we ate our home-canned stuff.
These days, I use a CSA or farmer’s market, or produce delivery box. Remember several months ago when there was a huge shortage of cauliflower? I mean, the stores here didn’t even HAVE it. If they did, it was $7 a head.
So anyway…I could probably do this but since I live in Southern California, it’s totally cheating and no big stretch.
Claire says
I grew up in Australia, and eating seasonally was a way of life. I now live in Canada, and the living is very different, with a 70 day growing cycle. As they say, “where there’s a will there’s a way”. It can be done with a very simple mindset adaptation. I grow most of our family’s food. It simply requires careful use of storage, and adding seasonal food preparation, herbs etc. most of all, ditch the attitude, and adopt an “attitude of gratitude.”
Good luck!
Anne G. says
I live in a rural part of Virginia where produce farms are plentiful. I grow a lot of our veggies and we eat local meat (fish, venison, beef) most of the time.
My favorite farm stand sells tons of stuff “in season” but they participate in year-round farmers markets in Washington, DC. Since they continue growing winter veggies, they have begun a winter CSA program that runs for about 10 weeks starting in December. They also have an online store where you place your order and pickup on a designated day. Many of their “city” veggies are things us farm girls haven’t ever heard of. Their inclusion of chard, kohlrabi and boc choi (to name a few) has expanded my knowledge. They aren’t the regular tomatoes, beans and cukes of my grandma’s garden!
I love the idea of eating seasonally and find it to be an easy concept to embrace.
Carole says
Growing up in the south ALL our food came from our land to include meat. If you wanted to eat you grew it or raised it or hunted/fished for it. Only flour, coffee, sugar and “meal” came from town. People have forgotten how to feed themselves. We canned and preserved all summer so we could eat in the winter. Its just what people did.
Mel says
I would be more than happy to do this. I already buy whatever is in season or buy frozen (or grow it myself). We eat quite a bit of cabbage, kale, and chard in winter. What drives me up the wall, though, is that even when something is in season locally, the grocery store still ships it in from California, Chile, or Mexico. I’m happy to have them import things that can’t be grown here, but it’s ridiculous otherwise. We do have a farmer’s market, but it’s only open a few hours Saturday morning and only in summer. And they don’t sell things like milk or advertise what they have in advance, so I’d still need to make multiple stops. Speaking of what’s in season, our asparagus is in it’s first harvest-able year, so I’ve been checking that bed daily waiting. Our first Meyer lemon is also about ripe.
Margery says
I think that today we are used to being able to get what we want when we want it, I would love to see an experiment of having some current American families live for a period of time ( Say six months ) and the only thing they have to do is live as if they only had the amounts of 1941-1946 to live off.
We do eat fairly seasonally and having moved to Kansas from NY still getting used to the growing season. But eating lettuce and tomatoes in my garden at the end of Nov was great.
My kids never understood why there grandma placed an orange in their stocking every year at Christmas and why it was such a big deal for her.
Margery says
That should say 1941-1946 ration books
Lindsey says
I collect British cookbooks from the war era. I was also privileged to go to the War Museum in London and walk in on a cooking demonstration given by Marguerite Patton, who made her living during WWII giving wealthy women whose cooks had left them for munition factory work and suddenly these ladies didn’t know how to boil water. It was about 2012, three years before she died. She was still vital and really interesting. Once every few months, a group of us get together and dress in WWII clothing and whoever cooks the dinner uses recipes from the ration cookbooks. (We each have only one dress that would qualify, but where else would we wear it? My husband has an old suit he inherited from his father and it really is WWII vintage!)
Mavis Butterfield says
We grew up with an orange in our stockings too. 🙂
Lynn says
I grew up with an orange in my stocking as well, and continued the tradition with our children-now grown.
Jennifer says
I would like this for one reason. I see people who will pay outrageous prices for out-of-season produce and it drives me crazy. None of my business, I know, but I can’t help it. I literally saw a woman pay $14 for 2 packs of raspberries last week and still can’t forget it. The next day, a mom with small kids paid $10 for a bag of grapes. Nope, I’m not gonna do it.
Now, to be honest, we don’t eat as many fruits and veggies as we should, but I only buy what is truly in season because it tastes better, just like God intended.
Kayla says
I have to admit that I am guilty of spending $10 on a bag of grapes because it was my son’s birthday. Sometimes being able to buy out of season is a fun treat. It was totally worth it.
Lisa Millar says
Overall I don’t think people would go for only buying in season – until they are forced into it from lack of supplies. We get trained to rely on supermarkets that will provide whatever our hearts desire!
There are many things I will not buy out of season – mostly because the prices are ridiculous and the item has no flavour (esp tomatoes)
Luckily our small hothouse has been extending our growing season and its only about about 4 months/year we are without things like tomatoes. I can generally stretch our potatoes to 9 months or so.
More people are going back to learning how to preserve their produce. You don’t even need to grow your own if you can buy in bulk in season and preserve it yourself.
Tiffany says
It would be very hard in Canada as so many things don’t grow here as such a short growing season. If you haven’t seen 100 mile diet (both the book and the tv show) it is very interesting and does make you think. I’m in Winnipeg, Manitoba so oranges wouldn’t exist ever if they weren’t brought in. I would love to grow my own but just don’t have the space to keep mini trees inside during winter. It is so easy to not buy local and support the farmers when the grocery stores bring in comparable items for much less. But we do try to grow tomatoes, zucchini, squash, etc. in the summer and hope to grow more items as we grow our garden.
Vy says
Lettuce, spinach etc are so crazy easy to grow in greenhouses, even in winter, there really is no excuse for shipping it in anyway.
I love my local farm stands because it’s fresh seasonal local food. All it took was one fresh grown celery to open my eyes to the watery weak mass produced stuff that’s at the store.
Leslie says
It seems to me that we are healthier because we are able to eat any kind of fruit or vegetable at any time of year. We forget that rickets, scurvy and other deficiency diseases used to be a real thing.
I want to compliment those who eat seasonally as it would not be an easy thing to do. Good on ya! But the reason we can take such an unconventional path is that we have the safety net of the supermarket and food from other areas of the country. If we had to live on what is grown locally, we would have to deal with crop failures (as in, “Sorry — there are no tomatoes this year”) and scarcity with its resulting high prices.
As raspberry growers, we love to supply local people — but our market is global. We could not afford to grow raspberries just for a local market, and you couldn’t afford to buy them. Our county in Washington supplies a majority of the US raspberries, and a large portion of the world market. The world wants raspberries, and our area is one of the few in the world that can grow them well. The small fresh market farms are great for supplying local, but to reduce a global market would be very, very costly for the economics of a community.
It is not a sustainable model to expect communities to feed themselves by what they grow on site. It takes a lot of resources to feed the world.
Claire says
You make a fair point, but isn’t Mavis’ point that there must be some sustainable compromise here?
Globalization has its inherent downsides too. Historically, you can look back to food shortages during both world wars, and see that food rationing was possible, without undue health compromise either.
Leslie says
That’s true. But I think this generation would call that adversity. We take for granted the abundance we have, and would consider it a downturn in lifestyle if we had to rely on only local.
Not that it wouldn’t be a good experience for us all! 🙂
You’re right about compromise…I’m not sure how that would really look.