Class Notes: Shopping for Produce
Produce is my favorite department in the grocery store — and not just because I worked in produce in a natural foods store for 7 years. What I love about produce is you don’t have to read ingredient lists and nutrition fact labels. Everything in this department is good for you. From your great grandmother to the most educated research nutritionist, they all agree: “Eat your vegetables; they’re good for you.” They have no or low fats, lots of fiber, dense vitamins and minerals. Mother Nature even provided dessert with the natural sweetness of fruit, so skip the sticky refined dessert products that offer zero nutrition and are high in saturated fats. Fruit satisfies your sweet tooth with the additional benefit of vitamins, minerals and fiber. The only problem is most of us aren’t getting nearly enough vegetables. 5 servings everyday – that’s your goal. There are so many vegetables to choose from; be adventurous. Try some new ones. Get a variety of colors and textures!
There are two other considerations when selecting produce: organics and seasonality.
Organics
You pay more for organics, so are they worth it? Researchers have sparred for years over whether organics are better for you. Are they more nutritious? Do they taste better? Maybe and Maybe. Organic farmers spend the bulk of their time making sure the soil is rich with nutrients and organic matter. Healthy soil grows healthy plants. The amount of minerals a vegetable contains directly relates to the quality of soil it was grown in. Flavor is a favor of both the quality of the soil and the variety of the plant (genetics.) But the true benefits of organics are in what they don’t have – no synthetic chemical residues. When you eat conventional produce you could be consuming as many as 55 different synthetic chemicals — from pesticides, fertilizers, fungicides, and other chemicals used in processing. If you want just a peach the way nature made it and nothing else, buy organic.
Are the chemicals sprayed on conventional produce harmful to your health? There’s a growing body of circumstantial evidence to suggest they are harmful, but that’s hard to answer definitively. Researchers have shown that these chemicals build up in the body over time and that people who eat conventional produce have significantly more of these chemical in their bodies. We also know that waste products from synthetic pesticides are showing up in our oceans and the seafood we eat. In the Central Valley near Fresno, California where a large portion of US produce is grown, farm workers and residents have statistically higher rates of several forms of cancer. However, proving that there is a direct correlation between pesticides and cancers would require researchers to control for a variety of lifestyle factors, dietary habits, and family history over decades – an impossible task. So if you are waiting for scientists and researchers to come to a consensus on that question, don’t hold your breath. The real question is “Are you willing to be one of the guinea pigs in this giant experiment called conventional farming?” If you asked the residents of Bhopal, India, they would tell you that agricultural pesticides are lethal. If you asked the residents of Minamata, Japan, they would tell you agricultural chemical wastes cause birth defects. No one is arguing that these chemicals are beneficial to your health, so you are doing yourself no harm in avoiding them. For me personally, if I ask “Is this safe?” and I’m met with resounding silence, I take that as a “No.”
Marketers and the media may be toting organics as a new trend, but organics are hardly new. Until fairly recently, all farming was organic; there were no chemical alternatives. DDT was invented in the 1940s along with several other pesticides. By the 1950s we knew the harmful effects of DDT. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was instrumental in bringing the truth about this deadly pesticide to the public forefront and eventually in getting it banned in the US. But the marriage between chemical engineering and farming would continue to grow stronger. Dozens of pesticides have followed since the 1950s. By the 1960s, what we now call “conventional” farming (farming with synthetic chemical pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers) had become the norm. Organic farming has been around for thousands of years. That makes conventional farming the new kid on the block. When you look at it that way, it seems ridiculous that a farm has to be certified to grow produce organically. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t you have to have permit to introduce synthetic chemicals into the food supply?
Seasonality
Seasonality is a far less controversial topic. It has everything on its side. When you buy fresh produce in season, the quality is better, the taste is superior, and the price is at its lowest. On the surface, seasonality is simple. It means buying produce in the season it was harvested — apples in autumn, citrus in winter, asparagus and lettuces in spring. Seasonality depends on your growing region. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to call the United States our growing region. But in today’s global economy, when you walk into a grocery store, you get the impression that everything is available all the time; you can get greenhouse grown tomatoes from Belgium and grapes from Chile and apples from New Zealand. I remember a situation that reminded me how out of touch we are with where our food comes from. I had a gentleman get very angry with me one Thanksgiving because the store I was working at didn’t have peaches in stock. I told him they weren’t in season but we would probably see them again around Christmas from Chile. He insisted I was grossly misinformed because his grandmother baked a fresh peach pie every Thanksgiving. She had died that year but he was going to continue the tradition. I debated for a split second whether to reveal his grandmother’s secret, but decided against it, felt too much like telling a child there’s no Santa Claus. I apologized for the inconvenience and wished him luck on his search.
So why wouldn’t you want grapes from Chile? After all, California grapes are not available year round. The short answer: Transportation. There are 2 factors in transportation – time and cost, and they are inversely proportional to each other. Time is not kind to harvested produce, so ideally you want to keep the amount of time from harvest to grocery store as short as possible. They are basically 3 modes of transportation for getting produce from the field to your local grocery store – boat (slow), airplane (fast), truck (in the middle.) Produce that has a longer travel time has to be harvested less ripe which is generally not good for flavor; additionally some produce is simply more fragile and doesn’t have that long of a shelf life. Tomatoes coming from Belgium by airplane have a short travel time but an expensive mode of travel. A boat is much more fuel efficient than a jet, but also a lot slower. Buying produce that is in-season somewhere else in the world and not in your growing region means you are either going to pay a lot more for it or the taste will be disappointing.
You also don’t want to buy produce from your growing region that is out-of-season. Apples are a great example. After the harvest, everything that did not go straight to market is put into either cold storage or long term storage. Cold storage is for the short term; it is refrigerated to preserve it until it goes to market. In long term storage of apples, apples are put in special storage rooms where oxygen is removed and replaced with carbon dioxide. This halts the ripening process. That is why you can still purchase Washington grown apples in March or even May. As you might have guessed, keeping these apples in stasis for months requires energy, which costs money, and that cost is passed onto the consumer. So in March you can buy the same apples that you purchased in October, but you’ll pay more for them and their flavor and some of their nutritional value will have declined.
Including a list of seasonal vegetables and fruits would be far too long, so here are some good resources for lists.
www.nrdc.org/health/foodmiles/ This is the Natural Resources Defense Council’s web site. I like this one because you can pull up lists specific to your state and the time of year.
www.cuesa.org/seasonality/charts/vegetable.php This is the website for the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture. This site provides the most extensive list of seasonal vegetables, as well as a separate one for fruits.