Food For Thought Category Archive

Regional and Seasonal Food

Can you eat regionally and seasonally?

The tastiest fruits and vegetables are almost always those that come to you at the peak of their natural harvest time. The freshest fruits and vegetables are almost always those that travel the least number of miles or kilometers to your plate after harvest.

Following the seasons and the harvests in your area—say within a radius of 150 miles--is one way to begin thinking about eating regionally and seasonally. Visiting farmers markets or produce stands in your area will give you a start on getting the hang of fresh and local eating. With a little luck, you might be able to eat regionally and seasonally half of the year, and if you are in the right place, you might be able to do it all year round.

If you can’t get to a farm market on a regular basis, take a look at the boxes your produce man is unloading or even at the stickers on the produce. It doesn’t take much investigation to find out how far your produce has traveled.

Remember, it’s almost always harvest time for your favorite fruit or vegetable somewhere in the world. The key is to figure out how far your produce traveled to get to you and what it might have cost in taste doing so.

The tastiest fruits and vegetables—and probably the most nutritious--are almost always those that come to you at the peak of their natural harvest time, not those that are ripening in the packing crate or on the market shelf.

 

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...More About Organic and Fresh

Oganic food. Fresh food. Local food.

The debate is sure to catch your ear once you've tuned in to what you eat.

Right now there is a fascinating online exchange going on between the well-known and best selling author Michael Pollan (who, in April, published "The Omnivore's Delight," a critque of the organic food scene) and John P. Mckey, the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Food Market.

You might imagine that Pollan and Mckey are on the same side of the fence.

Yeah, well, sort of.

To read the full exchange go to Mckey's blog at the Whole Food Market web site.

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Organic-Local-Fresh

Interested in a little deep thinking with that carrot?

There is a broad and deep debate going on around the carrot (and all vegetables) on your table. In the last month that debate has spilled on to the front pages of newspapers around the country.

In the good old days, say about a year ago, you could go to the farm market and pretty much expect that you were going to find carrots that were unlike the carrots for sale in the produce section at the supermarket. That is to say farm market carrots were fresh, organically grown and came from gardens or farms nearby. And by comparison, the carrots at the supermarket you pretty much hoped were fresh and as for how or where they were grown…well, you were never quite clear on that.

Since the supermarket carrots were almost always less expensive than the carrots at the farm market, you assumed that the supermarket carrots probably came from really big farms—field factories--that used big tractors and applied the latest and best fertilizers and herbicides to get the crop in exactly on time and into the market at a low price.

But putting aside price and savoring taste, you would no doubt swear that the organically grown carrot from the farm market was sweet and tasty and the carrot from the supermarket was orange and big.

Well, zooming your thinking forward, you concluded something like this: farm market carrot = organically grown by a local farmer = tasty; and supermarket carrot = big farm grown = good price.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting:

Since farm markets are not always convenient like supermarkets (think rain and snow and winter), there began a movement back in the ‘70s of organic food cooperatives, year-round organic food markets. Zoom forward to the ‘90s and forward again to today and you find organic carrot purveyors like Whole Foods Market. (Whole Foods was born from the merger upon merger upon merger of local organic food cooperatives.) Today, Whole Foods carrots are organic and tasty, and the Whole Foods Market company has 180 stores across the country and booked $5.7 billion in sales last year.

A number like $5.7 billion in organic carrot and other food sales in one year can attract attention.

So that explains the story on the front page of the New York Times last month reporting that Wal-Mart (the biggest grocery retailer in the world and universe) will be selling organic carrots and lots of other organic foods by the end of this year. (There is no reason in the world why the biggest grocer in the universe would not want a piece of 5.7 billion dollars every year?) So where will all those organic carrots come from? Think China.

Has your carrot (and vegetable) buying world just turned upside down?

Organic carrots from China = fresh = tasty? Well, yes if you live in China.

When you pick up your carrots at the farm market this week, think it over. If you stop by and chat with the market coordinator, you will probably learn that the carrots at your farm market came from within 50 miles or less of the market site. That’s pretty local.

If you stop by Whole Foods Market this week, ask the carrot buyer there where her carrots came from.

Carrots are good food for thought.

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