Seasonality and where food comes from
Design & Technology · Key Stage 2 · The School
Food has a season
SEASONALITY is the time of year when a food naturally grows and is harvested where you live. In Britain, strawberries ripen in early summer, apples and blackberries in autumn, parsnips and kale after the first frosts. Food eaten in its own season is usually cheaper, better tasting and has travelled less, because it has not been grown under heat or flown in.
Grown, reared, caught, processed
Ingredients arrive by four routes. GROWN: wheat, potatoes, apples, rice. REARED: animals kept for meat, milk or eggs. CAUGHT: wild fish and shellfish. PROCESSED: things made from the others — flour from wheat, cheese from milk, oil from seeds. Almost everything in a kitchen is one of these or a mixture, and knowing which explains most of what it costs.
Why the price moves
The same food costs different amounts across the year because out of season it must be grown in a heated glasshouse, stored for months, or flown from a country where it is in season. Each of those adds cost and energy use. That is why a punnet of British strawberries in June and the same punnet in January are not really the same product at all.
PUNNET A, June, grown 30 miles away: picked ripe, in season, low transport, cheap. PUNNET B, December, flown from Egypt: picked underripe to survive the journey, out of season here, air-freighted, dearer. Same fruit, and they are not the same product — the taste, the price and the carbon cost all differ. Check the country and the month on any packet and you can read most of its story.