OPEN SEASON
Eating seasonally can be fraught at the best of times, but what if we had it wrong from the get-go? The alternative, writes ALEXANDRA CARLTON, might require a whole new approach.
Eating seasonally can be fraught at the best of times, but what if we had it wrong from the get-go?
Last year, in the middle of winter, our flock of four Isa Brown hens deposited a yellow cherry tomato seed on our lawn in Sydney’s inner west. Within weeks, it had become a full-grown plant and was pumping out at least two punnetfuls of the sweetest yellow cherry tomatoes every day, entirely out of season – which was nice but also faintly shaming, as my deliberate attempts to grow tomatoes in summer had failed spectacularly. Around the same time, I was served a dish at Firedoor in Surry Hills that included fresh, bouncy spring peas. Chef Lennox Hastie explained that yes, they were also out of season but a mate of his grows them in the backyard and an unusual warm spell had caused them to burst
into existence months earlier than expected. These two events led me to two conclusions: one, that seasonality probably isn’t as rigid as we think it is; and two, when it comes to gardening I am definitely blessed with more luck than skill.
Australians love to eat seasonally. A 2017 Choice survey found that almost two-thirds of us consider seasonality when we buy our own fruit and vegetables, and our sophisticated food knowledge means we delight when a seasonal ingredient pops up on our favourite restaurant’s menu. “Our customers are real foodies, and they get so excited when, say, the first cherries arrive on our menus in December,” says Colin Mainds, head chef at Cutler & Co in Melbourne. But thanks to climate change, drought, El Niño, supermarkets flooding their shelves with everything all year round, and even our strange Euro-centric adherence to the concept of four distinct seasons, it’s become more difficult than ever for ordinary consumers to get their heads around what’s best to eat when.
Fluctuations in what we’ve long believed to be the natural seasons for many fruits and vegetables seem to be becoming more common. A spike in winter temperatures in 2018 saw a glut of Queensland strawberries flooding the market earlier than usual, causing many growers to dump their crops. In Victoria, Trevor Perkins, chef and co-owner of Hogget Kitchen in Gippsland, says he noticed the broad bean season was shorter than usual in the same year, and Mainds says he found that asparagus was around for longer. In New South Wales, 2018 was a shocking year for wild mushrooms. Simon Evans, chef at Wollongong’s Caveau, remembers having to replace the pine mushrooms he would usually forage and serve in his restaurant’s braised wallaby dish with king browns. “This is always the hard part of using wild ingredients, you never know what the weather is going to do,” he says. “One week they’re there, the next they’re gone.”
Climate change is certainly one of the culprits for these odd shifts, and it’s only set to get worse. We know that very warm months that used to occur two per cent of the time between 1951 and 1980 occurred 11 per cent of the time between 2001 and 2015. A study from the University of Melbourne says that by 2030, many areas of Australia will be too warm to grow the crops they’re currently growing. For example Golden Delicious apples and Lapin cherries may disappear from their current growing regions of Queensland and Western Australia entirely. Already, many farmers and producers are noticing unwelcome changes. Popular fish species such as kingfish and snapper are migrating steadily south as northern waters warm, or simply becoming more scarce close to the warmer coastal waters, making them more difficult to fish. Viticulture is particularly sensitive to rising temperatures and mainland winegrowers are already rushing to secure vineyard sites in Tasmania as the more northern states steadily become too hot for cool-climate grapes.
Another concurrent possibility for these out-ofseason fruit and vegetable appearances is that we’re simply looking at seasons all wrong in Australia, warping our idea of what should be available on our plates when. At Yarri Restaurant and Bar in Dunsborough, Western Australia, owner and chef Aaron Carr plans his menus according to the calendar of the Noongar people, who have lived in the southwest of the state for tens of thousands of years. The Noongar follow six seasons that don’t start or end on specific days, but instead rely on subtle environmental cues to signal their beginning and end, such as the flowering of certain plants, the appearance of goannas or the moulting of black swans. Notably, the Noongar recognise two springs (Djilba and Kambarang) and two summers (Birak and Bunuru), with the first spring starting as early as August, which could help explain those regular “unexpected” peas and tomatoes suddenly appearing in the middle of what Europeans refer to as winter. “At the moment they’re picking all the desert limes, so it’s a citrusy time right now, which is kind of weird,” Carr says when we speak in the middle of summer, referring to the fact that a traditional European idea of citrus-growing says that their peak season should be in winter.
Professor Tim Entwisle, botanist and director and chief executive of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, has been championing the idea of Australia adopting seasons that better reflect the calendar of the Noongar and other indigenous Australians since releasing his book, Sprinter and Sprummer in 2014. “If you look at Aboriginal people around Australia you’ll find that the number of seasons varies from two to 13,” he says. “Very seldom do you find four. Mostly the number is around six. These people have lived in the country for a very long time and the obvious conclusion to draw is that Australia doesn’t have
If you look around Australia, the number of seasons varies from two to 13. We don’t have the classical four seasons that we dragged over from the UK.
the classical four seasons that we dragged over from the UK.” He thinks the “unseasonal” oddities that many of us report are really not that unseasonal at all, and they’d make a lot more sense if we abandoned our traditional notions of seasons to think about our climate in a different way.
“When I worked at the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden, around late July or early August we’d start getting phone calls from people asking if we were having an early spring because they’d seen magnolias or daffodils or acacia,” he says. “For the first couple of years I thought it must be climate change, which it may have been in part, but then I realised that every year we’d get the exact same phone calls. And I realised that we were ignoring this huge flowering that went on every year, earlier than it was ‘supposed’ to.” He thinks the same thing probably happens with fruits and vegetables and suggests that if we keep that in mind then perhaps we won’t be quite so surprised by the surprises.
What does all this seasonal confusion mean for the ordinary food-lover who simply wants to know when the best time is to buy, order and eat the juiciest mangoes or the sweetest peas? Unfortunately it makes it particularly difficult, especially as climate change means things will only become more and more tumultuous. Supermarkets, where most of us buy our fruits and vegetables, offer little assistance as they are set up to sell everything all the time, sourcing produce from all over the world or freezing produce from earlier in the year to resell later.
Your best bet is to trust those who work the most closely with the food you’re eating. Ask for their direction and advice about what is happening with your favourite foods in this particular season of this particular year – be it chefs or farmers at your local growers’ markets. Don’t expect cherries will be there on the very first day of December. Ask your local fruit grower in advance about when it looks like they’ll be arriving and you’ll be best placed to get the pick of the crop. “We all want the seasons to start on the first of the month or the 22nd of the month or whatever it is,” says Entwisle. “As a scientist I like to have things neatly arranged.” Instead, he says, we should learn to embrace the mercurial nature of nature. “It’s quite exciting when you do it that way,” he says.
“The anticipation builds.”
And most of all, the trick is always to buy as locally as you can. That way, you know you’re always getting the freshest and most seasonally appropriate produce, whatever the weather is doing that year. Even if it’s yellow cherry tomatoes in the middle of winter.