When Food Stopped Following the Seasons

Can you guess which fruiting plant this is?

The Pause in the Produce Aisle

There is a particular kind of hesitation that happens in front of the produce wall. You stand there with a basket that already has bread and eggs, maybe yogurt, maybe nothing at all yet, and you scan the shelves. Strawberries in February. Asparagus in late fall. Tomatoes stacked year-round, smooth and identical, with labels that tell you very little about when they were grown. The question isn’t what you want to eat. It’s what makes sense to eat, and why that question feels heavier than it used to.

When Seasonality Didn’t Need a Name

For many of our parents, eating seasonally wasn’t a principle. It was a background condition. You bought oranges when they were cheap and good. You waited for peaches because there was nothing to replace them. Certain dishes appeared on the table with predictable timing, not because anyone was tracking seasons, but because that was when ingredients showed up in the market or the garden. The rhythm didn’t require much thought.

Grocery Stores Stopped Telling Time

Now the rhythm is harder to hear.

Part of this is logistical. Grocery stores no longer signal season clearly. Produce is sourced globally, arriving on schedules shaped by shipping contracts and cold storage, not by local weather.

The same vegetables appear every week, arranged the same way, under the same lights. The cues that once told you, without words, what time of year it was have been flattened into abundance. You have to actively look for signs of seasonality, and even then they can be subtle.

Cooking From Lists Instead of What’s Present

There is also the matter of time. Home cooking has been reorganized around efficiency. Recipes circulate faster than seasons do. A dish is quickly saved, bookmarked, or sent in a message because it looks good. When you shop from a list generated by a recipe, the produce section becomes a place to fulfill instructions rather than to gaze upon a living gallery. Seasonal eating asks for a different point of view: noticing first, deciding second. That “pov” has become less common.

Food Is a Modern Source of Anxiety

Our parents shopped differently because they cooked differently. Many meals were built from a smaller, more stable set of dishes, adjusted slightly depending on what was available. A pot of slow cooked braise softened and sweetened vegetables without changing their essence. A stir-fry absorbed whatever was around. This kind of cooking left room for seasonal substitution, fewer but healthy choices, and no anxiety. You didn’t need to wonder whether you were “doing it right.” You worked with what you had.

Today, food culture often rewards specificity. Exact ingredients. Exact textures. Exact results. When a recipe calls for zucchini (a summer fruit) in March, the store provides it. When it calls for basil (a summer herb) in winter, the clamshell (okay it can be harvested in winter) is already waiting. Over time, this conditions us to expect availability rather than respond to it. Seasonal eating begins to feel like a bother, a restriction, even though it used to be the default until about 100 years ago. That’s only 1, maybe 1.5 lifetimes. Have we evolved so fast that our bodies can afford to eat against the seasons? At this rate, our goal seems to be to cheat the Earth (and somehow come out on top.)

Climate Change

There’s also a shift in how seasons themselves feel. Climate instability has blurred the edges. Winters are warmer in some places, harsher in others. Growing seasons start earlier, end later, or fail unpredictably. Even farmers have to recalibrate year by year. For shoppers, this means the old markers are less reliable. When asparagus appears earlier every year, when tomatoes linger longer, the internal calendar gets confused. You hesitate because you’re no longer sure what belongs when.

The Food Gap

Household structures have changed too. Fewer people learn to cook by watching someone else cook daily. Skills that once passed quietly from hand to hand now arrive through screens, detached from place. A video can show you how to make a dish beautifully without showing you when people actually make it, or how they choose and store the ingredients. Seasonality is implied, but rarely stated, and easily missed. Most food content doesn’t even bother with seasonal produce. They go for the imported exotic fruits or the trending surplus crops of the year. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’d be a shame to waste all that extra food that could feed the undernourished world. So, we just gobble it all up in breakfast smoothies at premium price…served on a silver platter.

Putting Too Much Weight on a Meal

Then there is the quiet pressure to optimize. Food choices are now loaded with layers of meaning:

• health

• sustainability

• budget

• identity

• pleasure

Seasonal eating gets folded into this stack, framed as something to be achieved correctly. Simplicity disappears and meals become yet another decision that requires justification. Our parents didn’t have to defend buying cabbage in winter. It was just there, it’s healthy and filling so they learned to make it delicious (try our Kapuska or Turkish Cabbage Rolls if you haven’t already).

Generational or Systemic

None of this means people care less. In many ways, the opposite is true. The desire to eat well, thoughtfully, and responsibly is widespread, especially in this day and age. What’s changed is the environment in which those desires operate. When everything is available all the time, choosing with the seasons requires more attention than it used to. And attention is a finite resource.

You can see this in small moments. Someone reaches for berries in winter, pauses, then puts them back, unsure whether the hesitation is practical or performative. Someone wants to cook a familiar dish but can’t find the version that fits the month, so they abandon the idea altogether. Someone buys vegetables with the best of intentions and lets them sit because the plan felt abstract from the start.

Seasonal eating didn’t become harder because people forgot how. It became harder because the systems around food stopped reinforcing it. What once happened quietly now asks to be noticed, remembered, and chosen instead of the new trend.

The friction is structural, not moral.

How to Recalibrate

Standing in front of that produce wall, the uncertainty you feel isn’t a failure of knowledge or discipline. It’s a reasonable response to a food landscape that is so off-the-rails that it can no longer tell you the time of year. A calendar without seasons.

Still, people find their way back to the seasons in small, unremarkable ways.

Some go to the farmers’ market most weeks, even when they don’t plan to buy much. Walking past the same stalls, seeing what’s abundant and what’s not, does something subtle to the internal clock. You start to notice when strawberries suddenly appear everywhere, or when the greens grow thin and the roots come out. The eyes pick up information before the digestive system and start preparing.

Some pay attention to price. When something gets cheaper and better all at once, it’s usually a tell sign that it’s in season. Although, the price can be misleading due to other factors like surplus or disease.

Some people garden a little. In a yard, on a balcony or a windowsill. Even a single plant is enough to make time visible, and visible growth is a powerful motivator.

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