Are you ready to give up your year-round blueberries?

As consumers we're used to having seasonal food all year round – which comes with a huge carbon footprint. But are we ready to give up our favourite items to save the world?

When it's not in season, kale comes a long way to satisfy our obsession with having everything available all year round (Alamy)

Asparagus in February? Not a problem. Strawberries? Spoiled for choice. The same goes for blueberries, avocados and almost any other food you want to eat. We can fill up our grocery carts and dinner plates with anything and everything, that is if you don’t mind that your asparagus was grown in South America. And avocados? Last year wholesale prices doubled so our penchant for avocado on toast comes at a price.

And the price goes beyond what we pay at the till. Transporting food across the globe creates a massive carbon footprint. But do we have the stomach to change what we buy and when?

Emma Rock thinks so. She launched Season Supper Club with the aim to cook and serve only what’s in season. “I wanted to focus on seasonal because I don’t like the way big supermarkets in this country stock everything, all the time,” Rock says. “It feels wrong to eat things that are wildly out of season and shipped thousands of miles.”

Rachel de Thample, food writer and commissioning editor at Locavore – a new food journal – agrees. “It’s important to me on so many levels – namely local, seasonal food is better for you. The food travels less and thus, is fresher and often richer in nutrients.” De Thample feels that eating seasonally is smart for other reasons too. “Eating seasonally really puts you in tune with nature’s rhythms, which are wise beyond our grasp,” she says.

Food and gardening writer Lia Leendertz has captured those rhythms in The Almanac: A seasonal guide to 2018. “I wanted a handbook to connect with each month of the year and felt that a traditional almanac – listing sunrise and set, moon phases, the sky at night and so on – might fit quite nicely with a seasonal cookbook and information about seasonal food,” she says.

British asparagus is not currently in season, so if you buy it now it's probably come from Peru (Alamy)

Each chapter focuses on one month. In the chapter on February for example, Leendertz tells us that there will be no full moon this month, that in the far north of the country the day will lengthen by a full two hours and that it’s a good time to sow chillies in pots on a warm and sunny windowsill. In the kitchen? Leeks, kale and cabbages are still strong while pears, apples, carrots, swedes and parsnips are doing well in storage. And Leendertz doesn’t think only of fruits and vegetables when it comes to seasonality: clams, cockles and mussels are on her list till March, while February wraps up the venison season.

All things green: leeks, kale and cabbages are in season now and in abundance at farmer's markets (Alamy)

Back at the Season Supper Club, Rock not only cooks with the seasons but also using locally grown produce from the current site at London’s Spitalfields City Farm, marrying the concept of seasonal with local.

It’s an idea that intrigues Locavore founder Gavin Markham and the theme of the launch issue. “The strict definition of a locavore is someone who eats food produced local to where they live. And that’s pretty much where the agreement ends. People debate whether local means your own land or windowsill, within five miles, twenty miles or a hundred.”

Markham thinks this debate is healthy and long overdue. “Food is about people, not systems, or multi-national companies, or governments, so thinking about it locally allows us to cut through the overload and dead weight of information to get to the important stuff.” It’s about getting us closer to the food we eat, he says: who makes it, what’s in it and where it comes from. “The distance between the consumer and producer when wandering through a modern supermarket can often be vast.”

With year round availability of most food we lose the connection to it, which is a huge loss, Leendertz thinks. “We can erase the differences so easily with our year-round supermarket culture but we are doing ourselves out of a beautiful and simple connection to the moment and the season.”

Finding out where something is grown isn’t always easy, especially if you’re shopping online. While the major supermarket chains list country of origin online, it’s usually a list of all possible countries which might include the UK as well as places as far away as Peru and Egypt. Shopping at a local farmer’s market is a easy way to keep it seasonal or you can look for veg box delivery schemes like Abel and Cole’s British vegetable box.

Could forgoing asparagus in February or blueberries on our cereal perhaps be a gain rather than a loss? “I would go for stewed apple or poached pear or a dried fruit compote in place of those blueberries,” says Leendertz. “It’s not just for worthy reasons either: it has the added benefit that I really appreciate the soft fruit so much more when it does come around.”