Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

It depends, I guess, on what you include under the term 'Seasonal'. If 
you follow the wildebeast, you would be eating meat all year around.
Here in the Midwest, you eat fresh in the summer, pickled and salted and 
stored foods in the winter. Without storage, you would be eating game in 
the winter.
At least, that's how I think of it: eating what is available within your 
ecosystem or within your storage of foods (eating local without 
artificial environments). In hotter regions, storage isn't as practical 
without electricity, so you either eat the different things that are 
grown in different seasons, or you migrate someplace (snowbirds).

Modern life has replaced migration with trucking and shipping. It gets 
out of hand when we ship grapes from Argentina to the U.S. Not to 
mention the invasive species, insects, and diseases this generates in 
both regions.

I think that one of the biggest reasons for people to avoid thinking 
seasonally is that they have to think about the sustainability when they 
do. As long as they can get the same pizza and bananas and kumquats any 
day of the year, they don't stop to think about how these things arrived 
at the local WalMart. Once you start thinking, well, that's pretty much 
it for the fantasy of "Always Low Prices" and human rights and Green 
Suburbs.

Dan

> I'm going to stick my neck out and say seasonal is overrated. Seasonal is
> good - eating what's produced when it's fresh picked and all - but we've
> long ago learned to preserve certain foods for winter when fresh food in
> simply unavailable.  Societies have traditionally used root cellars,
> storing root crops in the ground or damp sand, salting or drying meats,
> pickling, fermenting, and so on. 
>
> paul tradingpost@lobo.net
>
>   
> > >I keep reading that a component of local sustainability is to eat
> > >seasonally, and that most don't know what that means.  Well, I'm one of
> > >them.  Other than what I grow in my garden, which is the same few
> > >vegetables that they have in the Farmers' Markets, I don't know what's "in
> > >season".  Apparently, there is a seasonality to animals, too, but since
> > >I've never grown or studied animals, I know nothing.
> > >
> > >Are there regional guides to food seasons?  We can't do the right thing if
> > >we don't know what is right.
> > >
> > >E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
> > >www.hillcountrynatives.biz