Fruit, vegetables and the trend towards year-round availability

I recently moved from a subtropical climate to a place known for its winter sports, so you would expect that the food available would have changed significantly, right? Well, surprisingly, that hasn't really been the case. Thanks to advances in science and transportation, I can still plan a dinner party with papaya shrimp cocktails as an appetizer, grilled lamb with asparagus and butternut squash as a main course, and a coconut apricot cake for dessert - no matter what time of year and no matter what hemisphere I'm in.

Think for a moment about where all the ingredients for this feast come from - and I don't mean the supermarket shelves, but the original source. Imagine that you had to gather and hunt for all these ingredients yourself. From a geographical point of view, shrimps, papayas and coconuts can be found in one climate zone, but it will be hard to find a lamb grazing under a coconut tree in the tropics. You wouldn't find asparagus, apricots or butternut squash here either, so we would have to travel to more temperate climates for these foods. And from a seasonal perspective, we would have to arrive in spring for the asparagus, late summer for the apricots and winter for the butternut squash. The dinner party just got a little complicated!

But back to reality and the fact that our supermarket shelves are filled with just about every food our taste buds could desire. We have developed extremely ingenious ways to ensure that these foods are ripe when we want them. But if you think about it rationally, even before our food became so globalized, we had almost everything we needed (well, maybe not always what your taste buds are craving). On the subtropical beach we had protein in the form of shrimp, carbohydrates in the form of papayas and fat from coconuts. Further inland, we would nourish our bodies during a cold winter with the fat and protein of lamb and carbohydrates from sources such as butternut squash.

Of course, the globalization of the food industry also has a few advantages - we can buy whatever we want, whenever we want it. From a nutritional perspective, this diversity means a variety of different vitamins and nutrients are available to us. But there are also a few potential drawbacks that raise the question of whether it might not make more sense to eat seasonally.

First of all, the variety of options can tempt us to eat too much - especially when it comes to carbohydrates. Fruit and vegetables are generally seen as healthy options, which they certainly are in reasonable quantities, but it's also possible to eat too much of something good.

In nature, you will rarely find such an abundance of carbohydrate sources lined up next to each other as in a modern supermarket. If you live in the tropics, you'll have tropical fruits like papayas, mangoes and bananas, and of course cane sugar to satisfy your sweet tooth, plus plantains and a few root vegetables for your starch intake. But if you live in a harsh, cold climate, your carbohydrates will probably come more in the form of root vegetables such as carrots, parsnips, turnips and potatoes. The only fruits that are available during the warmer seasons are things like apples, pears and strawberries.

Today, we can have all these fruits and all these starchy vegetables all year round and still assume we're eating healthy because we're not eating carbs in the form of donuts and other baked goods. But even though we may think we're eating healthy, the wide variety makes it possible for us to eat too many carbs.

But it's not just the variety that can lead to overeating. I think we've all had the experience of eating something that was sold as a banana and looked like a banana, but in reality was nothing more than a tasteless, banana-like substance. Something I would call a banana-like product that was obviously developed for human consumption.

This is just one example of how foods that are produced out of season often don't measure up to their naturally grown counterparts. They've been treated with a bunch of chemicals and grown in artificial conditions and then "frozen" for weeks or months for transportation, so by the time you get to the supermarket they've finally been chemically ripened.

It makes sense that such a banana will not taste the same as a banana that has ripened naturally under the hot Brazilian sun. The whole experience of eating one of these banana-like products doesn't satisfy me and I want something else. The logical next step is to grab some of the strawberries you bought today and if they are a little sour, you can always try one of the nectarines. Before you know it, you've consumed three or more portions of fruit when all you really wanted was a real banana.

But where should you start if you want to eat what's in season?

There are plenty of resources online that will show you what produce is in season in which region, but the easiest way to start without spending hours researching is to simply go to your local farmers market. Most of the produce you'll find here is locally sourced and therefore in season. It's worth a try - your waistline and taste buds will thank you.

By Megan Clements

Source: https://breakingmuscle.com/fuel/how-fruits-veggies-and-a-lack-of-seasons-contribute-to-overeating