What is seasonal food?

Sometimes the simplest words turn out to hide concepts of thorny complexity. Putting together my seasonal food cloud for April, I struggled with the question of whether to include Mediterranean oranges.

Oranges are one of the joys of winter and early spring, especially the peculiarly sharp sweetness of Sicilian blood oranges. But should they really be called seasonal here in England, hundreds of miles from the citrus groves of the Mediterranean?

Our idea of seasonality is closely tied to the concept of local. After all, just as all news is local – somewhere – so every basic foodstuff is local somewhere. (A lot of processed food, combining globally sourced ingredients, can hardly be said to be local anywhere.) And all fresh food must be more or less in season somewhere. (But only more or less, since modern production and storage methods have stretched the seasonal limits of many foods, providing English strawberries in December and New Zealand apples in October.)

After decades of increasing globalisation of food supply, local (and seasonal) food is enjoying a long overdue revival. Local food can be fresher, more sustainably produced, culturally richer and tastier – especially when its at the peak of its season. But not all local food is good food, nor is all good food local. Winter would be bleaker without those Mediterranean oranges, life poorer without chocolate and mornings near impossible without coffee.

There’s been something of a backlash recently against local food – and ethical food more generally. In December, the Economist riled against local, organic and fairtrade, suggesting that all can be counter-productive.

Attacking local food, the Economist raised the rather tired example of English tomatoes, produced in heated glasshouses in the colder months, having a larger carbon footprint than imported Spanish tomatoes – the energy required for heating outweighing that for transport. Fair enough, there will always be cases where local food is less good – in some sense – than imported food. But finding isolated counter-examples is a different matter to showing that local food doesn’t tend to be more sustainable, as well as being fresher and tastier.

The Economist went further in claiming that there is often no local alternative available to imported food. Rubbish! This is only true if you take a restrictively narrow approach to choosing food. There may be no local asparagus to compete with air-freighted Peruvian imports in December, but there are dozens of alternative local and seasonal vegetables. Why not eat some delicious wintry leeks or sprouts in December and wait till May to enjoy some sublime English asparagus?

And what about those Mediterranean oranges? As oranges go, they are the most local and seasonal choice in the UK. They’re undeniably tasty – juicy and delicious – and have been part of the English diet for centuries, albeit till relatively recently as an exotic luxury. There will always be a subjective element to deciding what’s seasonal or local. But I’m sticking with the Mediterranean oranges.