Why Seasonality Matters

Shopping and cooking seasonally is not a high-minded duty or a restrictive chore but a liberating pleasure. The downside of the modern food culture of infinite year-round choice is a kind of options paralysis - there’s so much on offer that you don’t know where to start. Understanding the seasons frees you from this ball and chain. In a world where the production and marketing of food have gone mad, seasonality is sanity. It implies freshness, good taste and even good health. And it offers the best and quickest solution to the never-ending question, what shall I cook today?’

Why Cook Seasonally?

I believe passionately that those who shop and cook in harmony with the seasons will get immeasurably more pleasure and satisfaction from their food than those who don’t. I’ve also observed, with mounting alarm, that our sense of seasonality is under threat. The supermarkets must take the lion’s share of the blame. For the most part, they seem not merely uninterested in seasonality but often keen to suppress it. They source produce throughout the world that homogenises their product range into a year-long display of cosy familiarity. Of necessity, the seasons still exert some influence on their stocking policy. Yet they will do everything possible to disguise this fact when presenting produce to their customers. They fear that seasonally driven marketing will result in inconsistent spending. They don’t want their customers to think seasonally, because they believe seasonality is not profitable.

It is a policy that is damaging the soul of British cooking. But I believe that it’s a policy that is also misconceived. It rests on an assumption that the British food shopper is fundamentally lazy, unresponsive to the concept of seasonal inspiration, and more interested in maintaining old and regular habits than exploring new and exciting possibilities.

This is, of course, a circular and self-fulfilling strategy. Deny consumers the chance to show an independent spirit and guess what? Amazingly, they fail to show much of an independent spirit. This can hardly be good for business.

The downside of the culture of infinite year-round choice is a kind of options paralysis, or consumer lethargy: there’s so much on offer that you don’t know where to start. Surely an understanding of the seasons would help free shoppers from this ball and chain. Why not make British produce in season - which is when it is at its best - the heart and soul of the store (if supermarkets can be said to possess either of these attributes)? The supermarket that dares to be different in this respect might just pull ahead of its dull and indistinguishable rivals.

Until this happens, if it ever does, supermarket shoppers will have to make a conscious effort to find the best fresh, local and seasonal produce hidden away among the jet-lagged imports. Fortunately, the fact that supermarkets are legally obliged to label food with its country of origin means this can be done. But the alternative I would recommend is to seek out a genuinely local greengrocer’s, farm shop or farmer’s market, or a local box delivery scheme, where the produce is almost by definition both seasonal and locally grown. Click here to explore these options further.

In the four years I spent at River Cottage, and at the farm nearby, where I now live, my own sense of the British seasons has flourished. They will, if we let them, feed us fabulously well. I have not the least doubt that I am a better cook and a happier person for having absorbed the rhythms of the growing year. I love the sense of anticipation and seizing the moment that goes with getting to know the shifting seasons: in the garden, on the farm, in the hedgerow and even down on the coast.

Of course, if you grow and gather your own food you can hardly fail to appreciate the seasons and their impact on the kitchen. So what about those who don’t? The majority who buy all, and grow none, of their food. In an age where the transport of food between the hemispheres is increasingly fast and furious, the question inevitably arises, why bother with seasonality? Maybe the supermarkets have got it right. Why not simply embrace the extraordinary array of choice we now have and cook what we want, when we want?

This is a big and important question. And I am aware that not all supposed food lovers agree with me about the answer. Much of the way cookery is presented in Britain - in books, colour supplements and on television - works against our understanding and appreciation of the seasons. It does so by fostering a ‘grass is greener’ mentality, making us aspire to someone else’s seasonality (or, ironically, their relative lack of it). It implies that the food and produce of sunnier climes (the Mediterranean in particular) are more worthwhile than our own. In short, it idolises the exotic. To those who perpetrate this idea, it may be a genuine source of regret that we do not have an endless summer in this country. I feel no such pangs. On the contrary, I think we have one of the richest experiences of the seasons of any country on earth. And we have a range of produce and a culinary heritage that reflect that experience and help to make us who we are. Our weather may be the butt of longstanding jokes among our Continental neighbours, and consequently, in that self-effacing British way, among ourselves. But don’t we love it really? Isn’t our summer so special precisely because, just like our autumn, our winter and our spring, it doesn’t last forever?

This sense of identity with our climate and the landscape it creates may not matter to everyone. But there are more practical and universal reasons for shopping seasonally. For example, what is locally seasonal will, with negligible exceptions, be far better than what is not. Most fresh produce doesn’t travel well, and the various processes and technologies applied to help it travel better are invariably detrimental to its eating qualities. By contrast, seasonal produce, locally grown, can be harvested and eaten at its best. Seasonality leads us not just to fresher, less travel-weary produce but also to better-tasting varieties of our home-grown favourites. Despite the overwhelming trend of globalisation and industrialisation of food, there are still small producers in this country dedicated to the art of cultivating the best varieties of our seasonal produce. They have not been genetically improved for the sake of shelf life, nor inoculated for long-distance travel. They are the guardians of the vital variations in the taste and texture of produce that allow us, by turns, to be individuals in our own taste - our safeguard against a future of bland homogeneity. If we do not use them, we will lose them. Finally, the fact that local, seasonal produce comes without a punitive cost to the environment, in terms of fossil fuels burnt in transportation, is a bonus many will appreciate.

I don’t want to get too po-faced and ascetic about this, wagging a disapproving finger at those who are tempted by a Costa Rican pineapple in July or Moroccan clementines at Christmas. For a start, you’re going to be waiting a long time before those English pineapples finally come into season! And I would be a hypocrite and a liar if I said I denied myself the undoubted pleasures of such exotics. Bananas, for example, are a daily staple in our house, as in millions of others.

The simple fact is we can’t grow bananas, pineapples and clementines in this country. And I have no wish to deny other agricultural communities the chance to sell their delightful produce in the global marketplace. I simply believe that an engagement with the global should be secondary to an engagement with the local. What is local and seasonal should be at the forefront of each shopper’s consciousness – and indeed of his or her conscience. (Incidentally, the scandalous politics and protectionism of the banana trade is a can of worms I would gladly open elsewhere. For now I’ll just declare my preference for the Fair Trade banana, which, happily, is increasingly available in this country.)

Nor do I wish to be over-prescriptive about the parameters of seasonal eating. The seasons cannot be rigidly defined. They are fluid and unpredictable. You can’t make a date in your diary for the first strawberry or the last Brussels sprout, any more than you can for the first cuckoo or the last departing swallow. They’ll do what they have to do, and they’ll do it in their own time.

In my book, The River Cottage Year, I chose the twelve months rather than the four seasons as an organising principle because I wanted to present, both visually and in the recipes, the sense of a slowly evolving year rather than four distinct seasonal ghettos. I actually want my readers to blur the edges between the chapters in their minds. And I’d be happy for them to conclude that most of the recipes in the book can probably be enjoyed in the month either side of the one in which they appear.

By describing and illustrating the seasonal rhythms of our growing and cooking year here in Dorset, I hoped to inspire some more of you to grow your own food. Far more importantly, I hoped I would inspire all of you to put British seasonal produce at the very heart of your cooking. Because, in the end, seasonal cooking is not a high-minded duty or a restrictive chore but a liberating pleasure. In a world where our approach to food often seems a kind of madness, seasonality is sanity. It offers the best and quickest solution to the never-ending question, what shall I cook today?

Taken from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's website click here for more info