≡ Keeping It Fresh
Five whole years ago, a study was published on American eating habits by USC-Berkeley Professor Gladys Block. She found that sweets, sodas and alcohol make up nearly 25% of the calorie intake of the average American. She also found that we’re only eating half as many vegetables as what is recommended — and half of that 50% is canned tomatoes, potatoes and iceberg lettuce.
That’s pretty grim.
Now I’m pretty sure you’re not eating that way. In fact, I know you aren’t. You are trying hard to eat with the seasons, to bring a rainbow of colors to your plate, striving for variety. After all, you’re independant. You’re not a creature of habit. You are living a modern life.
Modern life is exactly why our fruits and vegetables are no longer seasonal. I wasn’t raised on a farm but I spent a lot of time on them. I remember picking Saskatoon berries with my cousin Heather down in the same coulee that my sister Bridget says that cousin Daryl left her all alone; I remember my aunt Dorothy’s full-to-the rim freezer stocked with everything you could imagine; I remember harvest meals at the Weisshauer farm outside of Wilcox, Saskatchewan where everything was fresh from the garden, fresh from the oven, delicious.
I also remember that somewhere along the way, I got this idea in my head that having a vegetable garden was old fashioned.
Or not. Okay, I admit it. I am guilty of routine meal preparation and my family has been a victim of my actions. I have gone grocery shopping and felt deja vu — yep, the same things in the cart this week as last. That’s how it was. Week after week. Year after year. But this is another thing that I am trying to change. I’ve been encouraged, inspired and, well, embarassed by Plenty, a book by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon that chronicles their year of eating locally. They got me thinking about things I had never thought about. Like the true seasonality of fruits and vegetables. I know that asparagus comes out in the spring — but greenhouse agriculture has made us lose our seasons, making a lot of our seasonal food available at our grocery stores year round. Or if not year round, nearly year round.
What that means, of course, is the produce that we’re consuming isn’t coming from our local farms anymore. Our fruits and vegetables are sometimes grown one thousand — two thousand — or even more MILES from where we live. It looks good because it’s designed to be fresh once it hits the supermarket. And often it’s grown outside of the US because labor is cheap and the laborers are willing to work at those jobs; and the price of fuel is still cheap enough to make the harvesting, packaging, shipping and distribution profitable.
Well…we don’t have spaghetti every Wednesday. We don’t eat the same cereal every morning.
But variety is sometimes hard to do.
You come home from the grocery store or farmers market armed with good intentions for your family. Did you know that what you do next will make a big difference about how long those wonderful fresh those fruits and vegetables will keep fresh?
Now where do you put what? We’ll start with the outside and work our way in. Store potatoes, onions and garlic in your pantry or garage or basement — somewhere dark and cool. And don’t put the onions next to the potatoes because each produces a gas that helps each other deteriorate quicker. And when your garlic starts to sprout, throw it out.
Unripe bananas and pineapples be kept on a counter away from direct sunlight. Bananas can be stored on hooks, which helps prevent bruising while they ripen. Once ripe, you can put them in the fridge and they will stay ripe and tasty for a couple more days even if the skin has turned black. And if they’ve turned black on the counter and you don’t have enough time to make a banana loaf (as black bananas give banana loaf the best taste), then throw them in the freezer and use them when you need them. Over ripe bananas also make great smoothies!
Tomatoes shouldn’t be put in the fridge either because the cold takes away the flavor. Unless you want your tomatoes to taste like nothing, they should also be kept in a cool place, out of direct sunlight (so not on the windowsill) and keep the stem side down. If your grocer keeps the tomatoes in the refridgerated area of the store, then find another grocer because the deterioration process will have started already and your tomatoes won’t taste good.
Apples, too, are best stored outside of the fridge — and that also helps the rest of the produce in your fridge because they too give off a gas that speeds up the ripening process of other foods. Having said that, you can use that to your advantage if you’re trying to speed up the ripening process of other foods.
When it comes to your fridge, don’t just pile the new stuff on top of the old in your crisper drawers. Empty out your crispers, getting rid of everything that no longer resembles food and line the bottom of them with newspaper, paper towel or a hand towel or two. Newspaper (don’t be stingy about how much you use) can act as a cushion against fruits bruising, and for moist produce like salad, it can help reduce the amount of humidity in your crisper.
I don’t know about you, but I have personal experience of fostering ”the forgotten drawers”, the deep dark places of our fridges where mold and squishy stuff replace the healthy produce they once were! Peek into those forgotten drawers each time you open your fridge drawer and eureka you might start nibbling on carrots and celery instead of pulling out the Toblerone from that secret compartment at the top!
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