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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Eating Seasonally

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  • From: Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Eating Seasonally
  • Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2007 17:51:45 -0500

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





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