Hmm isn't frozen food - even veggies - very close in content to fresh food?
The real problem being not how the veggies are stored on their way to us, but how they're grown industrially?
A friend started growing vegetables, and I got some as a gift at the end of the season.
Just regular stuff like potatoes, carrots, celery root, parsnip and such.
Now when I got them I was very busy, so they sat in a cool and dark place for a couple of weeks before I had time to use them.
First thing I did was make a simple vegetable soup using only the vegetables I got from her, and it completely blew me away with the flavors.
I enjoy food and making food, and that soup was one of the best dishes I've ever tasted. Each spoonful was a feast.
I told my friend this, and she replied that she had noticed it right away herself, and like me was taken aback by how stark the difference was to what was in the grocercy stores.
I've made soups and stews with fresh and frozen vegetables, but nothing has come close to those homegrown ones.
Yeah well, my parents have a garden of some 1000 square meters (a quarter acre) and lemme tell ya, there's a lot of stuff you can grow on that area. Obviously as a kid I couldn't escape being sent to attend the garden and saying I wasn't a fan of that is an understatement. Unless you do it as a hobby it's not a pleasant activity.
In fact nowadays I use it to form a mental image on the enthusiasm that today's kids have for reading (and unfortunately mine is no exception). I read a ton as a kid and still read now but my kid wouldn't touch it with a barge pole unless forced to. Never saw him pick up a book on his own volition, that is.
But I imagine it's the same situation as me with tending the garden. Never, not once, did I go to my father and say "dad, gimme the hoe coze I wanna start hoeing the weeds between the tomatoes".
Bottom line, I'd take supermarket vegetables anytime to growing myself. It's just not for me :)
> read a ton as a kid and still read now but my kid wouldn't touch it with a barge pole unless forced to. Never saw him pick up a book on his own volition, that is.
My daughter didn't like to read too, until I bought her a book from Monster High universe (the hot topic for small girls at the time). She was hooked and now buys her own books from allowance.
Yeah she spent a lot of time on her small plot, and the result was essentially just a handful of meals.
Gave me a newfound appreciation for how much work growing crops is.
Yep, the difference in taste is remarkable.
I'm vegetarian and I've noticed there's an assumption made by many people that vegetarian or vegan food comes with sacrifice and is somehow lacking in pleasure. I can only assume this is because they have only tasted cheap supermarket vegetables or maybe just don't know how to prepare and cook them. I became vegetarian for ethical reasons but I stay for the flavour. I could never go back.
It's no surprise to me that the top vegetarian countries in the world (by percentage of population) have historically been countries like India, Mexico, Italy. All countries with long growing seasons. In India (again, historically, things are changing everywhere), they basically didn't even store food. Vegetables were harvested and eaten right away. Can't get fresher than that.
As with everything, though, you have to choose what to do with your life. Growing vegetables takes time (and money). Given the choice I think most people would opt to buy their vegetables from someone else so they have time to do other things. The problem comes when the quality of those veggies is slowly eroded over time in pursuit of profits. This problem isn't exclusive to vegetables, though.
India is up there because many of them are vegetarian for religious reasons.
Religion follows reality, though. It's not a coincidence that vegetarianism is common in Indian religions and not among the Inuit.
I guess the point is India can afford to be religious about vegetarian food because they can grow vegetables pretty much year round. India being a big country with all kinds of climate, there are pockets where is is much less enforced, e.g. the Himalayan states.
Yep. Even something simple like bay leaves. I have some from a community garden. Dropped in a couple as normal and you can immediately taste something different compared to store bought leaves.
Too bad local farming is not scalable.
There are things where you don't need scaling, maybe.
Around me there are a lot of those community gardens. It's encouraged by the city, and you can rent a piece of land for yourself.
https://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/tradition/en/home/tradi...
(with that said, I grew up on a "farm", and as a child had to do a lot of gardening. I understand your enthusiasm about the flavors, but oh heck no, I'll eat the tasteless food for now and happy to not having to deal with all the work in the gardens :) )
There are a few community gardens around me too. But how many members does that feed and entertain? Hundreds?
Farming for quality is a luxury activity.
Bay leaves that aren't dessicated and crumbled to dust in the sad little spice jar are kind of magical
We garden a lot, and buy shares and volunteer for local farming co-ops.
We don’t save any money this way but we eat better and feel more self sufficient.
This year will be my first crop of sweet corn :)
Yeah, frozen is pretty good and quite often better nutritionally as it is more ripe than the "fresh" stuff since it doesn't have to be cosmetically appealing or to stay "fresh" while going on the trip through the cold chain.
The general problem is with "fresh" as it is specifically optimized for the time spent in the cold chain. Produce has less water as that would bruise. Stuff is picked while unripe and then "ripened" in warehouses. Characteristics that cause degradation are bred out (like the enzymes in roses that give you the scent that is the defining characteristic of a goddamn rose). etc.
And, you are quite correct that the overarching problem is the consolidation of the food chain into a small number of giant "agribusiness" entities.
Yes exactly - and more broadly pretty much all food consumed globally is automatically selected by tolerance of storage + packaging + shipping. Many varietals and whole specimens have been lost to the annals of history because they cannot make it to a Walmart in North America from Mato Grosso in a scalable (and profitable) way.
Bananas, for example, are practically a miracle fruit for scalable production and distribution. They are incredibly consistent - have resilient skins, have lots of structure that prevents damage from packing, come in easily managed bunches, and (if temperature controlled) the ripening process can begin on demand at point of delivery.
And thus, this monoculture became susceptible to a single fungal plague that is killing the plantation!
And a replacement species is not available.
> And a replacement species is not available
There are many varieties of bananas still grown in SE Asia, the original home of the banana. If somehow Cavendish is wiped out totally, it's not too difficult to pick another cultivar, breed resiliensy to it, and restart the whole banana industry.
I've worked in a "fresh" vegetable packing factory once... I'll go with frozen food. Stuff like broccoli came in from the fields in crates on pallets and were put in cold storage, probably not frozen but close enough, and stayed there until they were individually wrapped. Frequently one of the crates or a whole pallet was moldy and had to be discarded. I have no idea how long it must've been in the cold storage for that to happen.
The place burned down a few years later, anyway; they stacked up pallets as high as the factory itself right next to it, iirc someone lit it.
Frozen is good for smoothies / shakes. You cannot put fresh berries in a mixer and get a smoothie back, instead you'll get an expensive lump of thick substance that you cannot push through the straw :)
The same process makes certain things difficult or impossible because the frozen fruits and vegetables will fall apart (quickly) when cooked.
Also, I will prefer frozen spinach to fresh any day because it takes less time to cook (you can measure enough of it right away into the pan instead of adding incrementally and waiting for it to whittle and cook down).
Also, I think all these compliments to fresh locally picked food vs the plainest cheap stuff from the supermarket exaggerate the difference... a lot. Sometimes there's indeed a noticeable difference because a particular sort of fruit or veg aren't grown industrially (eg. there are plenty of sorts of potatoes but in a supermarket you will find maybe two, which are probably the most resilient to pests). But if you were to grow the same sort of potato you buy from supermarket, I'm pretty sure the difference would be so small as not to be noticeable at all.
From what I understand, if you freeze anything quickly as opposed to slowly, the resulting ice crystals are much smaller -and they tend to have much better taste and texture.
this is true. the process is called flash freezing.
That said, this advantage gets completely undone if the frozen food is left in a pallet waiting to get into another freezer. the subsequent refreeze will introduce the very ice damage the original process was trying to avoid. you can certainly take steps to minimize thaw on the way to your freezer but you don't know if the entire supply chain was so judicious.
IMHO its more about the varieties that are grown for industrial scale and efficiency, rather than flavor. I was part of a community garden and started a lot of stuff from seed- celery, tomatoes, onions, garlic, lettuces etc... and I was overwhelmed by the different numbers of varieties of each and that "celery" isn't just celery. To be fair, not all of it was better- the celery variety was very bitter and chewy, but most other stuff was much more flavorful, though yields were smaller in most cases. The lettuce we grew in particular was so much better than anything sold in a store- at a cost of the fact that it would be wilted and almost unusable by the next day. We did throw in some garlic bulbs straight from the super market to grow next to our "heirloom" variety and the supermarket garlic was exactly what we were used to, while the heirloom was much stronger, and arguably more pleasant (I love garlic). Cooks often joke that "one clove" of garlic really means 5 to them, and I wonder if this is more of a result of breeding garlic over the years for different qualities other than its garlicky-ness instead of just recipe writers with a light hand... I don't think its the methods being used in large scale farming, but really more the varieties attempting to be grown.
There is also a factor that some types of foods will degrade within hours to some extent of being picked- Herbs I pick out of my garden like thyme and rosemary are extremely fragrant when picked, even a few hours later they are noticeably less so. I think many consumers have picked up on this, over the last decade or so I have noticed the fresh plants section of the grocery store expanding, while the "cut and plastic boxed" section of the store shrinking. I am in an urban area, most people don't have outdoor space (I didn't for many years), and I had difficulty keeping those plants alive when attempting to keep them going on my windowsill with a western exposure.
Not how they are grown, but when they were harvested.
Ripe tomatoes are more delicate than underdeveloped, still green tomatoes. So pick them before done developing, ship them, and they'll turn red in the weeks it takes to get to the store.
And if they are picked ripe, they'll also go bad before they even get to shelf via their weeks long boat journey.
That's why local is better, and your own garden better still.
It's better than days old refrigerated food, but not equivalent to freshly picked.
I grow beans in my garden. French beans and broad beans are quite good frozen, perhaps amongst the vegetables that tolerate the freezer the most. Very happy to have those out of season. But there is no comparison possible with the fresh stuff.
Texture and flavor may suffer, but nutritionally, there is no real difference between fresh or frozen. And in the winter, frozen is sometimes the better choice as they are frozen at the peak of readiness.
If it's sent shipped cross-continent(s) it might be.
The point of fresh to me is to have it come from closer sources, even if it's in a worse shape, and be consumed basically in a day or two.
For anyone caring enough, getting access to local(ish) fresh food can be a pretty good indicator of a nice place to live, and it's usually worth the tradeoffs.
I have access to fresh veggies by taking the elevator down and out of my apartment building. There's a fresh groceries store right in front if i want a salad.
But I have no problem with grabbing a bag of frozen veggie mix to make borsch.
Yes, but refrigeration enabled us to produce at massive scale and then ship large distances. Prior to that, you only ate locally (or what could be preserved through pickling and other methods).
And there's another issue I have heard raised — we ate a lot more probiotic foods before refrigeration because you could keep it over the winter.
It's proposed that our gut biomes desperately miss those days.
Exactly... the real problem is how they're grown.
Frozen vegetables are less nutrient rich compared to fresh vegetables, because they lose nutrients while being frozen. And to be honest, frozen vegetables are frozen in the first place because those vegetables would have gone to waste otherwise.
So not only is their original state already compromised, they're then even more so when they're frozen.
Freezing itself does not lower nutritional value.
Furthermore, if a produce purchaser is going to freeze, they freeze as soon as they possibly can to limit any spoilage or degradation, which hurts their overall profit. Frozen fruits and vegetables have typically retained their nutrition much better than "fresh" ones that were shipped from out of state.