Seasonality at the supermarket is a logistics fiction

A 14 January, produce aisle, seven in the evening. Strawberries. A film-wrapped punnet, uniform red, no smell. Next to them, round tomatoes sized like ball bearings and courgettes that have travelled more miles than I have this year. Above, a sign: “seasonal flavours”. I bought the courgettes. I didn’t come to put anyone on trial, I came to make dinner.

Three technologies are enough to erase winter

The first is the cold chain: an unbroken refrigerated tunnel from field to shelf, which halts ripening during transport. The second is controlled-atmosphere storage, where the oxygen in a room is lowered to put apples to sleep for months. The third isn’t a technology but a map: when it’s winter here, it’s summer somewhere else, and a container ship doesn’t ask where the grapes come from.

The result is a shelf that barely varies any more. The October apple and the April apple are often the same apple, picked once and woken up later. There’s nothing scandalous about that in itself. It’s even an achievement. It’s just no longer a season, it’s a release schedule.

The release schedule belongs to the buyer, not the soil

In a central purchasing office, the question isn’t “what’s growing right now”. It’s: which product survives transport, which size fits a punnet, which supplier accepts the price, which volume I can guarantee every week of the year. A fragile fruit with a short season is a poor industrial candidate, whatever its taste. A tough, uniform, barely aromatic variety available almost all year round is an excellent one.

That’s why the tomato varieties in the wholesale market look like a spare parts catalogue. They weren’t selected to please your palate, they were selected to survive logistics and to keep the margin intact. The grower bears the weather risk and takes the thinnest slice of the deal. Nobody has to lie for it to work: the word “season” just has to stay on the sign.

What I do, without making it a doctrine

I’ve stopped relying on the shelf to tell me what time of year it is. I look at what is piled loose rather than in punnets, what is plentiful and cheap, what comes from nearby. In January, that means leeks, squash, cabbages, citrus, potatoes. It’s less photogenic than a strawberry and infinitely better than a January strawberry.

I still buy bananas. I make curries with coconut milk that has never grown in Brittany. The point isn’t purity, it’s knowing what you’re buying: when I pay for a strawberry in winter, I mostly pay for transport, cold and staging, and very little strawberry.

The label goes further. January strawberries have ended up costing more than June ones, even though they taste of less. We call that a premium product.