Passing judgement on the unseasonal shoppers

The beetroot are soft. It’s one of the signs I look out for.

It means more than spring is here and winter is over. It means there is about 60 days before the bright, young, hard-bodied beets arrive. I don’t like soft-beet season much because soft beetroot don’t grate well and I grate a majority of my beets.

You can easily cause yourself an injury trying to combine them and, on account of the beetroot’s wonderful purple-red qualities, you may not notice you’ve suffered significant blood loss until you fall into a coma.

Which is one of the reasons I start bypassing beetroot in the supermarket until the new ones arrive. The other reason is money. End of season beetroot may be limp and squishy but they cost more than their crisp and tangy versions. This gastronomic injustice very nearly makes it physically impossible for me to put them in my trolley.

But that’s the thing with all fruit and vegetables. Each has a season where it is cheap and delicious. And each has a season where it is expensive and tasteless.

It amazes me that so many people would appear to be unaware of what I now know as a self evident fact.

So from June to October, for instance, whenever I see anyone buying tomatoes (the tomatoes that are $8-$12 kilogram and taste like rehydrated celery) I can’t help but pass judgement on them.

A person who keeps buying tomatoes through winter and spring, I think to myself, must be zombieing their way through life.

They probably buy corn when it’s $2 a cob and tastes like rubber, get Australian capsicum’s through winter when they are $3.50 a piece and buy pumpkin when it’s so old and mouldy it can only be sold in plastic wrapped pieces.

Their purchase of tomatoes demonstrates such a dire lack of situational awareness I would not be surprised to hear they had later drowned because they took a nap in a swimming pool.

Not only that, they obviously have no idea how to cook, which is so utterly inexcusable when it’s something we generally do three times a day, that I can’t help but believe the person must be a total imbecile.

Even I can recognise that is a lot to get from the act of buying tomatoes out of season and my assessment could have something to do with an envy at the wealth that allows them to be so oblivious of prices. Could have.

And I used to be seasonally ignorant too. Though aware of summer, autumn, winter and spring my main appreciation of them was temperature related. In the summery months it was warmer than the wintery months. And that’s about as deep as I ever went. Then I spent a year in Japan, a country so obsessed with seasonality they include the blossoming of cherry trees on their weather reports.

It helps that much of the country has four thoroughly distinct periods each year. You can’t miss that it’s summer because it’s so hot your eyeballs sweat. Autumn is just as obvious because a billion trees loose their leaves in the same 24 hour period.

In winter it’s so freezing they heat up the cans of drinks in vending machines and in Spring 97 per cent of the population gets hayfever.

The spread of pollen, like the cherry blossoms, is conveniently included in most weather reports, just in case you hadn’t realised you couldn’t stop sneezing and someone had made you swallow a brillo pad.

For every season there is also a perfect food. The mackerel is especially good in late Autumn and eel is at its best, like watermelon, in summer. Only a fool would eat cabbage outside of winter and spring was especially good for potato.

And then there was the arrival of the new-harvest rice, which caused so much excitement among the Japanese I knew I wondered if they might be unhinged by alcohol or prescription drugs.

The thing is, they were right. The food did taste better and, while I couldn’t really tell the difference between old and new harvest rice, it felt good to get in on the act and get excited about it.

When I came home I started to notice the seasons more. The summer flowering of the roadside toetoe and harakeke, the autumn mushrooms in the park behind my house, the deep dour greens of the winter forest canopy and the light green flush of spring abundance.

It felt as though I was noticing things for the first time and after that I couldn’t understand how I had never seen it before. It really opened my eyes to my world around me.

Which is why, since 2007 it’s been nearly impossible to remain friends with anyone I catch buying tomatoes in June.