Provisioning...and Eating Seasonally

Part of the challenge to consumers is finding foods and other goods produced within a reasonable distance of their homes and workplaces. In a word: provisioning. We all know the middle-class North American chant: I’m too busy, I don’t have time, and thus the excuse to ‘just grab something’

When I lived for a year back in West Virginia, away from Atlantic Canada where seasonality and provisioning is expressed in “fiddleheads!” (spring) “strawberry season!”(mid-summer) “blueberries!” (late summer), etc. etc., I had to figure out how to provision for the kind of eating I was used to doing: seasonal, lots of fresh vegetables in summer and fall, lots of frozen and canned in the winter and early spring (until the fiddleheads were announced, the rhubarb was ready, the first greens emerged...)

It was then that I realized how good I had it in Atlantic Canada. But I’m curious to know how many people out there are provisioning in this way...eating seasonally, putting foods aside for winter. Judging by the size of the crowds in the big store parking lots, sometimes I think people think it’s too hard to do this kind of shopping. And, naturally, the big stores know this, and that’s why the super-chains have managed to thrive. But think: how many people are getting a decent job out of the super stores? And would those people be happier doing something else if those big stores got scaled down, and part of their current business went to more local and small scale producers?

In the past, I have raised poultry and lamb, and before the nightmare of 2007 was involved with an operation that was dairy and beef oriented, with some grain and forage production. I’ve tried the Community Shared (or Supported) Agriculture system of selling subscriptions to folks who then get a share of the garden produce, and as a kid on the farm that you see here, my father raised corn on leased ground (as well as did custom work) and we had a little bit of everything, although, because of the steepness of this hill farm, it was always more about livestock and forage than market crops...i.e., cattle, sheep, hogs, broilers, layers. My grandfather, his father, had raised strawberries, eggs, had tried going commercial with both poultry and horticulture, I believe, but for a number of reasons he did not make much of a go of it. Topography and distance to markets was part of the problem, as was the cheap food policy that had begun to change eating habits in the 1950s and ‘60s; this had begun to make it impossible for smaller farmers to compete, price-wise, with what food was coming out of the South, California, and the Midwest. My father got into agriculture, as did I, in sort of a backhand fashion, through the university....but that’s another story, for another day. I had to post again this old instant photo of the farm, again, the year my grandfather bought it.....