Eating Seasonally Without Making It a Whole Thing

Seasonal eating gets presented as a lifestyle commitment, which puts most people off. In practice it is a shopping heuristic: things at their peak are abundant, and abundant things tend to be cheaper and taste better. You can capture most of the benefit by noticing prices rather than memorizing a calendar.

The reliable signal is the price of the thing you did not plan to buy. When a vegetable is stacked high near the entrance at a price that seems slightly too good, it is probably in season. That is the week to build meals around it.

Spring is the green season: asparagus, peas, fava beans, scallions, radishes, new potatoes, rhubarb and the first strawberries. These need almost nothing done to them — heat, fat, salt, acid. Anything more elaborate fights the ingredient.

Summer brings the fruit and the nightshades: tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, sweet corn, peaches and other stone fruit, and berries. Summer tomatoes and winter tomatoes are practically different products; this is the season to eat them raw and the season to make sauce for later.

Fall is roots, squash and orchard fruit: pumpkin, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, parsnips, leeks, mushrooms, apples, pears and plums. It is also a great time to fill a freezer, since harvests arrive faster than anyone can eat them.

Winter narrows to hardy greens and storage crops: cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, celery root, rutabaga, potatoes and citrus. Cold weather can actually improve some of these — kale and Brussels sprouts often taste sweeter after a frost.

Two things make this stick without effort. Shop the produce section before deciding on meals, rather than arriving with a fixed list that forces you to buy whatever is in worst condition. And when something is unusually cheap and good, buy extra and freeze or preserve it — that is how a summer glut becomes a February dinner instead of a March regret.