My favourite foodie time of the year is coming and I can smell the cinnamon, the pumpkin and I’m salivating at the thought of Brussel sprouts and lardons!
Eating in season is not only kinder on the purse but also kinder on the environment and focusing on this stuff is a great way to get enough veggies into the diet – this morning I bought my first parsnips of the year and so I’m inspired to write about this one today!
Simply, eating is season is about buying and consuming foods when naturally, in your country, said food is ready to harvest. As we all know different fresh foods grown in different climates, conditions etc – asparagus as spring time rocks around for example, and squash as the autumnal months come in.
Now it isn’t super easy unless you look hard at packets and do a little research because now you can get almost anything all year round – I eat butternut squash every week of the year for full disclosure!
It really makes sense if you think about it that foods are most rich in nutrients immediately after they are picked – that’s why your frozen peas tell you they were frozen within an hour of harvest! It ‘locks’ all that goodness in. So naturally, eating in season has its health benefits. As things are transported across the world, into our shops and onto our plates, despite the efficient nature of shipping these days, some of that all-important nutrient intake is lost inevitably.
Eating in season, is also a great way to reduce your carbon footprint – imagine if we drastically decreased the transportation of food around the world? So many greenhouse gases are produced during the growing, transporting and selling processes. Of course, there is an element of carbon footprint to eating seasonally locally too but a reduction is better than nothing – right?
We are lucky enough to be able to get access to almost any fruit or veg we would like these days giving us so much excitement with our nutrition but also nutrient variety which is fabulous for the gut. Of course, all of this is in an ideal world, we won’t all be solely eating sustainably consuming foods grown locally using only natural means, that’s largely unrealistic in most environments in this day and age but anything we can do is better than nothing I say.
Perhaps you could grow your own – that would be even more impressive! How about we all do a little research this week and try to include something a little different in season within our big shop? At the moment? Think things like blackberries, pears, pumpkin, carrots, kale, leeks and of course, parsnips!
Enjoy! Peace and love, A x
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