Hmm isn't frozen food - even veggies - very close in content to fresh food?
The real problem being not how the veggies are stored on their way to us, but how they're grown industrially?
The real problem being not how the veggies are stored on their way to us, but how they're grown industrially?
Just regular stuff like potatoes, carrots, celery root, parsnip and such.
Now when I got them I was very busy, so they sat in a cool and dark place for a couple of weeks before I had time to use them.
First thing I did was make a simple vegetable soup using only the vegetables I got from her, and it completely blew me away with the flavors.
I enjoy food and making food, and that soup was one of the best dishes I've ever tasted. Each spoonful was a feast.
I told my friend this, and she replied that she had noticed it right away herself, and like me was taken aback by how stark the difference was to what was in the grocercy stores.
I've made soups and stews with fresh and frozen vegetables, but nothing has come close to those homegrown ones.
In fact nowadays I use it to form a mental image on the enthusiasm that today's kids have for reading (and unfortunately mine is no exception). I read a ton as a kid and still read now but my kid wouldn't touch it with a barge pole unless forced to. Never saw him pick up a book on his own volition, that is.
But I imagine it's the same situation as me with tending the garden. Never, not once, did I go to my father and say "dad, gimme the hoe coze I wanna start hoeing the weeds between the tomatoes".
Bottom line, I'd take supermarket vegetables anytime to growing myself. It's just not for me :)
My daughter didn't like to read too, until I bought her a book from Monster High universe (the hot topic for small girls at the time). She was hooked and now buys her own books from allowance.
Gave me a newfound appreciation for how much work growing crops is.
Too bad local farming is not scalable.
Around me there are a lot of those community gardens. It's encouraged by the city, and you can rent a piece of land for yourself.
https://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/tradition/en/home/tradi...
(with that said, I grew up on a "farm", and as a child had to do a lot of gardening. I understand your enthusiasm about the flavors, but oh heck no, I'll eat the tasteless food for now and happy to not having to deal with all the work in the gardens :) )
Farming for quality is a luxury activity.
I'm vegetarian and I've noticed there's an assumption made by many people that vegetarian or vegan food comes with sacrifice and is somehow lacking in pleasure. I can only assume this is because they have only tasted cheap supermarket vegetables or maybe just don't know how to prepare and cook them. I became vegetarian for ethical reasons but I stay for the flavour. I could never go back.
It's no surprise to me that the top vegetarian countries in the world (by percentage of population) have historically been countries like India, Mexico, Italy. All countries with long growing seasons. In India (again, historically, things are changing everywhere), they basically didn't even store food. Vegetables were harvested and eaten right away. Can't get fresher than that.
As with everything, though, you have to choose what to do with your life. Growing vegetables takes time (and money). Given the choice I think most people would opt to buy their vegetables from someone else so they have time to do other things. The problem comes when the quality of those veggies is slowly eroded over time in pursuit of profits. This problem isn't exclusive to vegetables, though.
We don’t save any money this way but we eat better and feel more self sufficient.
This year will be my first crop of sweet corn :)
The general problem is with "fresh" as it is specifically optimized for the time spent in the cold chain. Produce has less water as that would bruise. Stuff is picked while unripe and then "ripened" in warehouses. Characteristics that cause degradation are bred out (like the enzymes in roses that give you the scent that is the defining characteristic of a goddamn rose). etc.
And, you are quite correct that the overarching problem is the consolidation of the food chain into a small number of giant "agribusiness" entities.
Bananas, for example, are practically a miracle fruit for scalable production and distribution. They are incredibly consistent - have resilient skins, have lots of structure that prevents damage from packing, come in easily managed bunches, and (if temperature controlled) the ripening process can begin on demand at point of delivery.
And a replacement species is not available.
There are many varieties of bananas still grown in SE Asia, the original home of the banana. If somehow Cavendish is wiped out totally, it's not too difficult to pick another cultivar, breed resiliensy to it, and restart the whole banana industry.
The place burned down a few years later, anyway; they stacked up pallets as high as the factory itself right next to it, iirc someone lit it.
The same process makes certain things difficult or impossible because the frozen fruits and vegetables will fall apart (quickly) when cooked.
Also, I will prefer frozen spinach to fresh any day because it takes less time to cook (you can measure enough of it right away into the pan instead of adding incrementally and waiting for it to whittle and cook down).
Also, I think all these compliments to fresh locally picked food vs the plainest cheap stuff from the supermarket exaggerate the difference... a lot. Sometimes there's indeed a noticeable difference because a particular sort of fruit or veg aren't grown industrially (eg. there are plenty of sorts of potatoes but in a supermarket you will find maybe two, which are probably the most resilient to pests). But if you were to grow the same sort of potato you buy from supermarket, I'm pretty sure the difference would be so small as not to be noticeable at all.
That said, this advantage gets completely undone if the frozen food is left in a pallet waiting to get into another freezer. the subsequent refreeze will introduce the very ice damage the original process was trying to avoid. you can certainly take steps to minimize thaw on the way to your freezer but you don't know if the entire supply chain was so judicious.
Ripe tomatoes are more delicate than underdeveloped, still green tomatoes. So pick them before done developing, ship them, and they'll turn red in the weeks it takes to get to the store.
And if they are picked ripe, they'll also go bad before they even get to shelf via their weeks long boat journey.
That's why local is better, and your own garden better still.
There is also a factor that some types of foods will degrade within hours to some extent of being picked- Herbs I pick out of my garden like thyme and rosemary are extremely fragrant when picked, even a few hours later they are noticeably less so. I think many consumers have picked up on this, over the last decade or so I have noticed the fresh plants section of the grocery store expanding, while the "cut and plastic boxed" section of the store shrinking. I am in an urban area, most people don't have outdoor space (I didn't for many years), and I had difficulty keeping those plants alive when attempting to keep them going on my windowsill with a western exposure.
I grow beans in my garden. French beans and broad beans are quite good frozen, perhaps amongst the vegetables that tolerate the freezer the most. Very happy to have those out of season. But there is no comparison possible with the fresh stuff.
The point of fresh to me is to have it come from closer sources, even if it's in a worse shape, and be consumed basically in a day or two.
For anyone caring enough, getting access to local(ish) fresh food can be a pretty good indicator of a nice place to live, and it's usually worth the tradeoffs.
But I have no problem with grabbing a bag of frozen veggie mix to make borsch.
It's proposed that our gut biomes desperately miss those days.
Frozen vegetables are less nutrient rich compared to fresh vegetables, because they lose nutrients while being frozen. And to be honest, frozen vegetables are frozen in the first place because those vegetables would have gone to waste otherwise.
So not only is their original state already compromised, they're then even more so when they're frozen.
Furthermore, if a produce purchaser is going to freeze, they freeze as soon as they possibly can to limit any spoilage or degradation, which hurts their overall profit. Frozen fruits and vegetables have typically retained their nutrition much better than "fresh" ones that were shipped from out of state.