Seasonal Products

Conventionally, seasonal products referred to merchandise specific to a holiday season—items and associated colors and fragrances sold during well-established times of year: heart decor in February, pastel baskets in spring, beach imagery in July, foliage motifs in autumn, and cinnamon scents in December. Within the rubric of green consumerism, however, seasonal products adopts a more ecologically minded—and thus literal—meaning. Rather than referring to the time of consumption, the seasonal aspect of a product has come to describe the time of its production. Usually, seasonality within green parlance refers to foods and agricultural products—products directly reliant on, and thus related to, the various seasons of the year.

Globalization of the agrifood industry has allowed for rapid and regular international transport of fresh produce. This mobility was first facilitated by refrigeration, and then by an alteration of the produce itself—from agribiodiverse and organic (though not yet certified as such) to the uniformity of monocrop produce, bred and sprayed to withstand mechanized harvests, long-term refrigeration, transport, and shelf life. In North America, mass production allowed for relatively (or falsely cheap) Thanksgiving asparagus, Christmas fruit salad, and Valentine's Day chocolate-dipped strawberries.

Over the past few generations, this agricultural transformation has resulted in a marked shift in aesthetics. What began as luxury became necessity. After World War II, the ability to purchase nonlocal, nonseasonal foods became a marker of status, conferring an aura of personal wealth, and ultimately of societal progress. Now, however, postindustrialized communities, defined as individualized consumers, have come to expect the same array of fruit and vegetable options in January as they do in June, and they depend on daily snacks comprising fresh produce grown around the globe.

This presumption is predicated on the deliberate erasure of the time, place, mode, and means of produce's production. The produce aisle of the modern supermarket presents its goods as the context-less, place-less, timeless (nonseasonal, nondecaying) product of name brand, multinational corporations. Photogenic, shiny uniformity thus becomes the standard by which fresh produce is judged, not the subtleties of its taste, ripeness, texture, nontoxicity, or nutritional quality, nor the social and ecological consequences of its production and distribution.

[Page 392]Green consumerism, in contrast, seeks to address this spatial and temporal disconnect, with the local foods movements working to redress the former and the seasonal products phenomenon the latter. As the essential counterpart to the celebrated attribute of local, seasonality constitutes and necessitates a shift in expectations and appetite. For instance, consumers and nutritionists have come to value—and recognize—only a small handful of ironically healthy fruits (apples and bananas) and vegetables (lettuce and tomatoes). Large-scale seasonal eating, however, would require a decidedly more exploratory and creative consumptive paradigm on the part of the masses, wherein eaters appreciate more “exotic” wild or locally adapted foods and varieties, from kohlrabi to dandelion leaves, as well as the edible parts of otherwise familiar foods, from beet greens to garlic scapes to pumpkin seeds. It would also require collective patience to wait diligently for melon season and an investment in researching local and seasonal sources of vitamins and minerals available in each place, around the year.

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