Personal Project: Seasonal Food

Something that I decided to take a look at this week is seasonal food. I haven't really given much thought to seasonality as I've gone through this project. However, recently I started looking into what the benefits of seasonal food are and how to find seasonal food.

One of the biggest benefits of seasonal food is its nutritional value. One thing I did not realize is that our food loses its nutritional value the longer it goes before it gets eaten. Here's how it works:

Take produce for instance. Our produce gets nutrients (vitamins and minerals) from the soil. Once it gets picked from the tree or plant, obviously it is no longer receiving nutrients, so it's at its most nutritious right after picking. This makes sense, but the part I didn't realize is that these nutrients degrade over time. Once they're exposed to light and oxygen, these nutrients start to break down and leach out of the produce. So if you don't eat that piece of produce as soon as it's picked, you're going to get fewer nutrients. The problem is, most of us aren't farmers, so we can't eat our produce as soon as it's picked. Therefore, we're not getting the full effects.

There are several ways that we lose nutrients from our food. One is by picking food before it is really ripe. I learned that much produce is picked before it's fully ripe because it has to travel so far to get to its final destination. If we pick food before it is ripe, it does not acquire the full nutritional value that it could have, so once the nutrients start to degrade, they're doing so from a lower baseline nutrient level. Much produce is processed (read: irradiated) as soon as possible to lock in the maximum amount of nutrients possible, but even this process sometimes causes produce to lose some nutrients. Canning and freezing have pretty much the same effect.

Another problem with nutrients is the distance the piece of produce has to travel to get to its final destination. I've heard it estimated that, on average, our food travels 1,500 miles to get to our plate. Imagine the amount of nutrients that are lost in this process.

The best solution I've been able to find to this problem is to buy seasonal food. The advantage to buying seasonal food is that you know you're getting food at its freshest and most nutritious. (As an added bonus, the fresher and more nutritious food is, the better it tastes!) This has a lot to do with the fact that seasonal food is often also locally grown (because what's in season depends a great deal on geography). So you're getting several benefits at once if you're eating seasonal food: eating healthy, supporting local farmers, and cutting down on the miles that your food travels to get to your plate. That cuts down on the greenhouse gases your contributing to the atmosphere.

Thus far, I haven't made a huge effort to specifically eat seasonal food. Or at least, not intentionally. Given that I've been shopping much more at the farmer's market, I think almost by default I've been able to buy some seasonal food. But there's plenty of things that are grown locally on a seasonal basis that I haven't really tried: things like pumpkin, squash, snap peas, and eggplant are in season during the fall, but I haven't really tried any of them. This is mostly because I don't know how to do much with any of them.

So this might be something to try in the future. Tasty, seasonal, local food would create variety and be an opportunity to try something new while helping the local economy and eating healthy food.

A few links:

Here's a list of Indiana produce and meat and when it's in season.
Here's another one that's even more comprehensive.
You can find seasonal guides for any state here.
Here, here, and here are articles about the benefits of eating local, seasonal food.
And finally, the top ten ways to eat local, seasonal food all year can be found here.