Seasonal Eating — A Farmer's Perspective

Harvest season had a smell before it had a sound. Apricots first — that sweet, almost fermented smell that hung over the orchard rows in the early morning before the heat came up and changed it into something sharper. Then later, when the rice fields dried down before cutting, a dust smell, dry and mineral, nothing like the orchard at all. Two smells, two different kinds of work, both meaning the same thing: this is the part of the year where you stop tending and start bringing in.

I never thought about "eating in season" back then. It wasn't a philosophy. It was just what was around. You ate apricots because there were suddenly ten thousand pounds of them and somebody had to deal with the ones that didn't make the pack line. You didn't eat them in January because there weren't any. The idea that a person would choose to eat seasonally, as a kind of practice, would have struck me as backwards — like choosing to be tired at the end of a long day.

So it's a strange thing, this week, standing in the seasonal section of the grocery store, or walking a farmers market table, looking at what's stacked up and thinking about it on purpose. There's research that says food eaten closer to its harvest window holds more of certain nutrients, that flavor compounds degrade with storage and shipping time, that a tomato picked green and gassed to ripen isn't quite chemically the same experience as one that ripened on the vine. I believe most of that. I also know what a study measures and what a kitchen actually gets aren't always the same thing. The lab controls for one variable at a time. The produce aisle doesn't control for anything — it's whatever made the truck that week.

What I keep coming back to is something simpler than nutrient density. In season, the food was just better, and everybody around me knew it without needing a citation. Nobody argued about whether a August apricot beat a February one. You didn't need a study for that — you needed a mouth. Maybe that's the whole case for seasonal eating, before you get anywhere near the research: it tends to just taste like more.

There's a practical piece too, one that has nothing to do with virtue. Food that's in season where you are usually traveled less distance to reach you, which mostly means it's cheaper, and there's more of it, which is its own kind of quality control — you can't hide a bad crop when the whole valley has ten thousand pounds of the good version sitting right next to it.

I don't know that I've fully earned the right to talk about "eating seasonally" as some kind of settled wisdom. I'm still working it out myself, same as anybody standing in that produce aisle trying to remember what's actually good right now versus what's just available. But I notice I keep gravitating toward whatever's stacked highest and cheapest at the market this time of year, and I don't think that's an accident. Maybe the growing side of me never really left — it just moved to the other side of the register.

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