I know there's an argument about eating seasonal, 'local,' food to reduce the carbon emissions from transporting food.
I have never heard an argument that "pickled and dried foods are better then" (in winter). If you are trying to suggest that food eaten in season is more nutritious than eating non-seasonal food you might need to provide an authoritative source. It also smacks of an attitude based on a northern European (or northern American) view of seasonality.
Those of us who live in a semi-tropical region of the Southern Hemisphere may also have a different take on seasonality.
OB
Occams Barber: You asked from whence came my data. It actually came from two sources the one you already named is one. The second is from studies into the epigenome. These are found in our cells and act as switches that turn on and off the genes or sometimes partway off or on. They are the source of all inherited diseases. Science is still puzzling all this out however because studying the “switches” within the genes is difficult.
JS:Still they have discovered that the triggers come from several areas: what you eat, whether you exercise and your levels of stress. A Nova episode on this topic gave one example. If famine strikes an area all female children born during the famine will suffer problems with inflammation later in life. Any young boys, toddlers, for example, living during that time will also suffer inflammation.
These effects can carry over to future generations, thus my problems and struggles within inflammatory bowel disease can be tied back to my grandmother going insane and eating only toast for three years. She carried my mom during this time and I inherited my condition from my mom who got her condition from her mom. Both our daughters suffer this as well.
Now to how this effects diet and why following in the footsteps of our ancestors diet is wise. Our present genome mixture is based on their actions back a hundred to two hundred years ago (three to four generations ago). So what do I know about my ancestors?
1. They ate seasonally, eating fresh foods in late spring, all summer and early fall.
2. They relied in winter on a wide variety of pickles which they ate out of a living vinegar (with its mother) eating one variety eat day. We since learned such vinegar can cure acid reflux.
3. They ate different greens at different times, dandelions in spring, mustard and lettuce in summer, cabbage, & lettuce in fall, kale in winter. They ate different squashes, summer in summer and all winter they ate winter squash. They ate roots in winter and in spring, brussel sprouts in fall.
4. They ate bread once a week on Shabbos or the L-rd’s day. They ate far more grains, long cooked and with dried fruits and nuts in a porridge.
5. They ate far less sugar: honey in the fall and winter and maple syrup in the spring and summer. Yet these two sugars were used rarely, often for holidays and fruit was their main sugar source otherwise.
6. They ate fresh during the growing season, and canned, dried, pickled and root cellar foods throughout the winter, and kale they harvested from under the snow. They ate flowers and far more wild foods than we do today
7. They ate fish year round and meat only for holidays usually. Sometimes they included dried meat in Shabbos cholent or Sunday stew.
These are the facts I drew from my own ancestral heritage but those coming from the southern hemisphere, the islands or orient or other different heritages would indeed have a different mix. Talking to your elders who might remember their past better might help you create a form of seasonal eating that would match your heritage better. Wild foods would likely differ as well.
In our case we lack the crocks, and most pickled foods I know are too sweet for me to make anyway. I add a living mother in a vinegar to my morning tea instead. We do freeze kale and brussel sprouts, we eat meat far less, fish weekly. Finding out I’m gluten intolerant has made making porridge a little harder. We do not have a root cellar or attic. So I working on all this going as far as I can. Sometimes getting healthy is a work in process.
