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Comment by bttrfl | Hacker News Reader

There's no scientific basis for my choice, but I have almost entirely stopped eating seasonal produce out of a season. I eat tomatoes in the summer and early autumn and then I patiently wait months to eat them again. When the winter comes I switch to vegetables that I haven't eaten at all or in limited amount for past half a year - beetroot, cabbage, carrot and more. I also eat all kinds of quality fermented, processed and dried stuff.

It made me fell in love with vegetables and fruits and whatever the season I just can't wait when the next starts. I also think this approach is more sustainable.

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Does anybody have a good suggestion for figuring out which produce is seasonal? Do you just buy stuff grown in/around your home country? It seems like I can usually buy any vegetable I want, regardless of the time of year, so I have no sense of when anything is in season.

At least in north america, the supermarkets have to label where the food is from. You’ll begin to notice the difference between seasonal NZ and seasonal California, for instance.

I do suspect that there are sites and apps, but don’t know of any off-hand.

A big one is simply price. Produce tends to be cheapest, often dramatically so, while it is in season.

I live in Greece and only buy seasonal produce because everything out of its season is choke full of pesticides, plus they don't taste the same. For example tomatoes in September are sour, while if you buy them during February they're sweeter. You can also tell by their shape, produce grown in a greenhouse looks in a far better shape than the one grown in the field, because the latter is exposed to weather condition and it takes a beat on its surface/appearance. As a general rule of thumb, the more uniform a vegetable/fruit appears the less tasty it is.

Other than that, there are plenty of guides on the web regarding what to buy when. Just make a search for "seasonal vegetables and fruits" and you'll find a lot of infographics.

The easiest way is to avoid supermarkets.

I have a small market nearby where I buy, once a week, directly from small local farmers. You can learn the calendar there quickly.

Another bonus is that I bet you can ask the people working the market and they'd be more than happy to explain what is in season and when!

For the really lazy like me, Whole Foods has a wheel in their produce department which shows what's in season. Maybe something similar exists in your local grocery store ?

You can get a chart and hang it up in your kitchen. Moving to europe really opened my eyes up to following the seasons. The vegetables taste better, and you feel better knowing they didnt have to be imported from extremely far away

I live in the US and had some family visit from france a few years ago. They came back from the supermarket absolutely giddy about buying a melon and these huge beautiful strawberries in january.

Then they ate some and were completely let down at how bland they were and I was just like, yeah, you can but that's why I don't.

Someone here on HN made this some time ago, but it still emails me weekly: https://harvestsignal.com/

Is a too generic question that could fill a book. Most people just ask to somebody. Libraries and grandmas can definitely save the day in this sense.

If you search for "$REGION + in season food" you will likely find listings. Most states have local food departments that focus on creating marketing material and such.

When I went to Italy on vacation, all of the produce had massive quantities of the same two fruits, prominently displayed. (Was June, I think it was apricots and cherries.) And that is what most customers were buying.

So we bought those, too, and they were delicious.

Then tried buying some things that were out of season, and they were terrible.

Which is just to say, some cultures are still super in tune with the seasonality of foods.

That's still common in North America, just not at the major chains. I often shop at Asian grocery markets, and it's hard to go wrong picking from the big bins that are spilling out onto the sidewalk.

Another advantage: more different kinds of greens than I knew existed. And they're basically all delicious stir-fried with garlic & salt.

Are there cultures that aren't "super in tune with seasonality"?

I mean, every country that I've lived is well aware of what produce is in season.

Doesn't need a scientific basis -- in-season produce just tastes better.

For some it's not such a big difference but for others (tomatoes!) you might as well be eating a different plant.

Tomatoes strike me as something that more people should grow at home, where space permits. There seems to be a bigger delta in quality for tomatoes than most other produce when picked fresh, and they’re not the kind of vegetable that most of us go through a huge amount of[0]. Also, they don’t consume a huge amount of space; even a planter on the porch can produce a decent yearly crop.

0: Except for soups, but for that kind of application canned tomatoes are best, since they’re canned when fresh rather than being picked before ripening to survive shipping.

Note: I grow strawberries and my landlord grows tomatoes in the backyard, and we can taste a HUGE difference between what we grow and what is at the supermarket. Just when our crops ripen we get stuff from the supermarket and it is probably half a year out of season for where it comes from and the following week or two we can harvest our own crops, and boy can we taste the difference.

What culture are you from that doesn’t use many tomatoes? My girlfriend and I go through 4 tomatoes when we make hogao which is a Colombian staple. That is, we make it every other day.

This approach definitely works great! One addition I would make is canning / fermenting vegetables at their peak, so that you can enjoy them throughout the year until the season starts again (canned tomatoes, pickled cabbage, etc.).

This method definitely keeps things fresh (no pun intended)! My kids are really good about eating fresh produce but I've noticed that they also appreciate rotating new things in every few weeks/months.

Summer/autumn is easy - you can feed your kids new things every day. Jars (and cans) will help you go through winter/spring. I buy mine from the same folks I buy fresh vegies/fruits from.

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