Why Strawberries in March Taste Like Disappointment

There was a time when eating was a seasonal affair. You ate tomatoes in summer, pumpkins in autumn, and apples until you were sick of the sight of them. Strawberries arrived like a surprise party in June, were eaten furiously for six weeks, and then disappeared for the rest of the year, as they rightly should.

Now? Now strawberries are available year-round, flown in from whichever corner of the earth still has a vaguely temperate climate and the willingness to pick fruit for next to nothing. But these strawberries, out of season and out of sync, taste of precisely nothing. They are ghost berries; visually impressive, emotionally vacant.

And yet they persist. Because modern consumers have developed a pathological resistance to waiting for anything. If it’s not on the shelf, it’s a scandal. If it’s not in the trolley, it’s a catastrophe. The idea of “seasonal eating” now sounds almost subversive, like something practiced only by yoga teachers and people who grow their own beets. But perhaps it deserves a comeback.

Why Everything Tastes the Same (and Nothing Tastes Like Anything)

There is a cruel irony in the modern diet: everything is available all the time, and yet very little of it tastes as it should. Tomatoes are bred to survive a 5,000-mile journey, not to taste like tomatoes. Apples are waxed into unnatural shininess and stored for months in cold storage, long after their spirit has departed. Cucumbers are crunchy, yes, but so is packing foam.

What’s lost in this globalized buffet is flavor. Real flavor. The kind that explodes because the thing was actually picked when ripe, not several weeks before and coaxed into mediocrity with artificial ripening agents and wishful thinking.

Seasonal food doesn’t just taste better, it behaves like it wants to be eaten. It smells right. It looks alive. It doesn’t require a dressing, a glaze, or an apology.

The Carbon Footprint of Convenience

Flying a punnet of blueberries from Peru to London (or California to Toronto, or anywhere to anywhere) is not a neutral act. It may seem harmless, tucked between the Greek yoghurt and the almond milk, but those berries have more air miles than most people.

Seasonal eating isn’t just about taste, it’s about footprint. Eating what’s local and in season dramatically reduces transport emissions, packaging waste, and the energy required to keep things "fresh" long after they should’ve gone soft and gone home. And no, this doesn’t mean going full forager or surviving on turnips for six months of the year. It just means choosing food that makes sense for the time and place. A mango in July? Glorious. A mango in December? Dubious.

The Joy of Waiting

Modern life has done an excellent job of removing anticipation from the human experience. Want a meal? Tap your phone. Want a sweater? It’ll be on your doorstep tomorrow. Want a strawberry in the middle of a snowstorm? No problem.

But something is lost in this relentless immediacy: delight. The particular joy of the first strawberries of the season. The first tomato that actually tastes like a tomato. The first peach that drips unapologetically down your chin. Seasonal eating brings back that joy. It makes food something to look forward to, not just something to acquire.

A Modest Proposal

No one’s suggesting a full return to 1950s rationing or forcing anyone to pretend they enjoy turnips. But perhaps a gentle nudge toward the seasonal wouldn’t hurt. A loose awareness of what grows when. A decision, now and then, to skip the January strawberries and wait until they’re real.

There are tools for this. Seasonal food charts. Farmers’ markets. That one friend who joined a veg box scheme and won’t shut up about it. They’re not just for food snobs, they’re for people who want food that tastes like itself. And really, that’s all anyone’s asking: that food be allowed to be what it is, when it’s meant to be. Juicy in summer. Hearty in winter. And occasionally, yes, boring in February, but that’s what spice racks are for.