three bowls

Seasonal and local eating is all the rage nowadays, and as mentioned before, my general knee-jerk aversion to trends makes me a bit skeptical about all of the hype.  Will people keep doing this two, five, ten years from now?  It can take more effort, more planning, more trips to the market, more creativity and, quite frankly, a heck of a lot more money sometimes. 

I just remember being in middle school and being very very concerned about the environment, and it felt – at the time – like it was a Thing, you know?  REM's Green album and whatnot.  Saving the rainforest was very trendy back then; did that actually help the rainforest at all?

Not sure, but I do feel like when things become too fashionable, there is an inevitable fatigue that sets in, and that’s what makes me wonder if this current craze is not good in the long run.  The backlash has already started, with charges that the whole eating local is elitist and that the obsession with eating local (and talking and writing about what you're eating) has become both priggish and boring.     

Then again, who knows?  People have been saying that reality TV – my other main writing topic (she admitted with mild shame) – is a trend that’s on its way out for years now and it keeps clinging to life.

Granted, the level of intellect and effort it takes to watch reality television (quite possibly a negative level, I have noticed that I feel quantifiably stupider since I started having to pay close attention to Rock of Love and Flavor of Love and - lord help me - Age of Love ) versus the level of thought and energy it requires to eat seasonally and locally are quite different.  That might mean the difference between a sustainable habit of sustainability and a trend that eventually collapses under its own cumbersomeness.  Much like this paragraph.

But!  My tendency to look critically at such things doesn’t mean I am not going to make my own best effort.  Achieving the ideal level of seasonal/local saintliness isn’t my goal; I am still eating Mexican cherry tomatoes and if that makes me a bad person, then...then I am the world’s least exciting bad person ever but at least I have adequate levels of lycopene.

I can still work to make the most local choices in season as possible, within reason for my own budget and sanity, though.  A recent forum post on Chowhound spurred me and another poster to provide some info - mine partially shamelessly stolen from a post on Slog that had serendipitously just appeared.  So if you want a little guidance on what to eat when, here is the combined list of the resources:

Across the Country

• Field to Plate - What’s In Season in Your Region?

Washington State (link from Field to Plate above)

• Pick Your Own - Harvest Calendar

Seattle and Puget Sound Region

• Seasonal Cornucopia - searchable database of seasonal Puget Sound-grown ingredients
• Puget Sound Fresh - see link on left to “What’s Fresh Now?” PDF
• King County Harvest Grids - color-coded by month for each produce item
  • Vegetable Harvest Grid
  • Fruit and Nut Harvest Grid
• Seattle Farmer’s Market Yearly Produce Calendar Overview – “rough list of what's on the market tables each month of the year”
• Seattle Farmer’s Market “This Week” Ripe and Ready – “based on farmers' reports of what they are harvesting this week to bring to the markets.” 
• Ballard Market “What’s Fresh?” list – this one was last update on 12/21/07, but the file name looks like it’s referring to 7/31/07.  So in case that first link eventually goes dead if they change the file date, here’s the link to the main Ballard Market page, which should have a link to the updated “What’s Fresh.”