How do you "Eat seasonally" in a cold climate?

I think it is harder in cold climate to see seasonally then warm climate. But if you store your food in cans or freeze it through the year I would say that would be fine too. I think because we import so much food that we lost the whole season food.  I do think that if you can eat as much as you can of your own grow food and or local farm foods the better and healthier you will be. Depending on your location you will be eating different things. as an example I live in 10A I grow lettuce and swiss chard and all my greens from sept-may. so my growing season is much different then someone in say zone 5 that eats and grows greens from april-august. but you can also go by fruit trees. They tell you when to pick them each year.
Mulberrries are April and may
Oranges are oct-Feb
poms are sept-oct

something like that. Also there are great benefits in health eating this way. each fruit of veggie has what you need for that time. Oranges come out in the fall right when you need vitamin C, berries come out in the summer when you need antioxidants. The problem is we have gone so far away from nature as a nation that we have lost all of this and gone to processed foods that are not healthy.

I personally only eat fruits and veggies I did this for health my family was sick for a long time and this changed our lives from going to the doctors, Er and clinics to never having to go to the doctors no pills and health. We did this 3 years ago and never looked back. I will say food is much more expensive but there is no doctors bills that have drained our saves. hopefully the young fruit trees  and vines we planted 2 years ago will grow big and will feed us. till then I buy local fruit and grow most of my veggies. It has been a long road but it has been worth it.

To all the Permies out there if your not able to eat the fruit you grow please message me what you have. I love unique stuff.
stay health all and eat whatyou grow.

So many good thoughts about what eating seasonally could/should mean. I first read about it from John Douillard and his original blog posts regarding it have expanded the topic as he digs deeper. He does a lot of mapping of recent scientific study results to ayurvedic practice. Here is a link to a 2019 blog post: https://lifespa.com/seasonal-living-original-biohack/

I am sure there are many other posts regarding seasonal eating if you search the history. Also seasonal eating food lists and such available for free download....

Ben Zumeta wrote:Cold climates generally have led to cultures of meat eating, smoking, fermentation and other preservation methods. Animals with thick fur and fat layers are how ecosystems store energy through winter, and humans in cold climates have cultures that utilize this.

I think a great example of the benefits to the consumer of a seasonal diet lies in how tomatoes grown in the sun in their natural season produce 350 or so phytochemicals and flavor/aroma compounds, whereas those grown in greenhouses without full spectrum sunlight (due to glass or plastic filtering out much of the spectrum) produce only 50 or so. This leads to less flavor in greenhouse grown tomatoes, as well as inferior nutrition, and what is there is not as appropriate for what the human consumer needs for that time of year. Many of the 300+ chemicals produced only by tomatoes in full sun are for protecting the plant from the full spectrum of light and helping it make use of it. Many of these sun-grown tomato produced chemicals are also used by our bodies to help us tolerate and benefit from that same full spectrum of sunlight when we are out in the sun at the time of year we are meant to eat tomatoes. This is also similar to how medicinal plants produce more complex and complete medicinal compounds in full sun.

For these reasons along with thalate contamination and plastic pollution, I only grow seedlings/starts or overwintering tropical perennials under plastic or any kind covering. I also avoid soft plastics that leach known carcinogens and hormone disruptors, and only last a few years before becoming more microplastic trash. Full sun is the only way to fully actualize a plant's potential nutrition in my fairly well researched opinion. I could provide the citations, but it would be just as easy for anyone to do a basic search of the abundant literature and decide for themselves.

I'm extremely interested in this phytochemical difference in greenhouse vs outdoor grown tomatoes.  Do you have any links to information on this?

My climate is not as cold as yours, root vegetables and some greens stay in the ground over winter, but don’t grow any bigger, so by taking this food directly from the garden, I am eating seasonally, but the cool weather and limited daylight mean that the garden is acting like a giant fridge and storing the veggies rather than actively growing them, and to me, eating from the root cellar or fermenting jars is no less seasonal than getting it directly from the garden at this time of year.

One approach to eating seasonally could be connected to energy use - we could grow a bunch of summer veg and freeze or can it and rely on that as a major source of calories all through the year, and that would use a lot of energy, or we could also grow roots and have them in the ground, clamp, or root cellar, and also have the odd jar of pickled or fermented veg and sauce to brighten meals up a bit.

Another aspect of seasonal eating is about eating different things through the year - summer there is lots of turnips, potatoes, beans, zucchini, and lettuce, autumn we might have tomatoes and carrots as well, winter and spring there’s lots of potatoes, roots, winter squash, kale, and stored grains. Some times of year we have more dairy or eggs, sometimes less, other times more meat, other times less.

Mike Haasl wrote:I've often heard the advice to "Eat Seasonally".  I figure that at a minimum this means you shouldn't be trying to eat asparagus in the autumn.  And it kind of means we should eat salads in early summer, gorge on tomatoes in September, eat apples in October.  Easy peasy.  But what do I do in February?  

Some traditional winter foods I think of are chili, lasagna, chicken soup and roasted veggies.  Those rely on things that are harvested in the fall and preserved.  So does preserved food count towards eating seasonally?

Or is it eating with the seasons in the way my ancestors (northern European) would have?  Meat and stored root crops?

My understanding of the expression is just that living in Central Wisconsin, I shouldn't try to eat strawberries in January: doing so means that they have to come at great expense from somewhere in the Southern hemisphere, and that is a waste of resources: There's enough fruit to eat here. We just need to adapt to eating a bit differently.
So it is more of a "locavore" ideology. When we think more like :" waste no want not", then we can "eat seasonally".
As far as what is there to eat in February that is "fresh" in Central Wisconsin, the answer is "not as much".
But our ancestors ate cabbage, potatoes, carrot, turnips, parsnips fresh well into the winter by adding mulch, or burying carrots in sand, so there's a way, even as far as "fresh". Endives can be forced to provide us with a fresh salad. Corn can be dried on the cob and made into corn chowder. Even now, nearing mid February, I have pumpkins and squash safely tucked away to eat fresh.
Peas and other pulses can be kept as seed for the following year and some can be eaten. Apples can be made into juice and pasteurized. Our ancestors and some of us still hunt, so there's that.  
When we started living in towns and depend on other folks to grow our food, we became spoiled rotten and careless: No need to save food for a rainy day, no need to learn to can/ dehydrate, preserve in a root cellar:  We just go to the store.
This reliance on others, though, does put us in danger of not having enough if we lose alliances, have political disputes with countries that provide us avocados or if there is a pandemic of avian flu, or even an evil person that poisons our food on purpose, and we are plagued with recalls of bad food that made it to our stores.
Other than that, just like any other animal in the winter, we just tighten our belt, change our diet. A big advantage that we have over animals is that we can put food in jars by canning and dehydrating a lot of fruit/ berries, salting and canning meat.
We do not need those stores to eat healthy as much as those stores need us to make a profit on processed food.

I live in Ontario, climate zone 4/5, with a frost-free season of 120 days or so (depends on the year!).

For myself, I frame the question as, "How can I grow and store a year-round, full-breadth diet in this place?" My interest in growing all my food myself is in eliminating the ecological costs of transport, working towards agricultural methods that align with my values (powering the labour without fossil fuels, avoiding plastics), and allowing for nutrient cycling via a compost toilet, so that mineral nutrients aren't being drained from my land or anyone else's by export. So maybe I am responding more about extreme locavorism as the framework in which I make sense of the idea of seasonality.As many people have mentioned, I think this approach also brings along the benefit of a healthier-than-average diet.
For the past few years I've been working toward this goal with my household. We have had a few varying exceptions to this local diet over the years, so this isn't quite a complete picture, but certainly >95% of all food we eat. I can tell you it's very possible to eat well on entirely local food! Either as an omnivore or a vegan, although I would point out that people raising their own livestock on a small scale tend to buy in grain - this is less about localism per se and more about avoiding externalizing that cost of my food system to somebody who grows grain with a tractor and conventional fertilizer.

Summer and fall are the easy times; that's when everything is growing. Winter and spring are the challenging times when most of the diet needs to be stored from the growing season.
I prefer storage methods that don't use electricity due to the ecological cost of an industrial energy form. I favour storage methods that are as simple and low-energy as possible because that's easier for the worker and takes less energy, say, in the form of firewood for canning.
So, in decreasing order of preference:
-Passive storage at room temperature (just keep it dry) or in a root cellar
-Dehydrated food (solar dehydrator or, in late fall, screens set up near the wood stove)
-Canned food (on rocket stove)
-Produced fresh (dairy, eggs, and fresh-butchered meat), a few potted herbs
-Vegetable/fruit fermentation is great; I don't know much about it (yet)

I think of staple foods as the ones high in carbohydrates or proteins (and, to a lesser extent, fats), since these are what make up the bulk of my diet, providing the energy and amino acids needed to move and maintain the body. Obviously no food falls tidily into one category or another, but here are the foods I've worked with divided approximately along those lines. (Dry legumes, for example, are a decent source of carbs, but I tend to think of them more as a protein source.)With the exception of potatoes, plant-based staples tend to be stable to store all year and more, so "seasonality" as such is not an issue.

Carb: potatoes (August until the following June at least; could be dehydrated as chuño in winter if you really want to eat them in the summer), dry corn (flour, dent, and flint, some pop), small grains (wheat, rye, spelt), grain amaranth
Protein: Dry beans, dry peas, soybeans, runner beans, fava beans, grasspeas, black walnuts ("domesticated" nuts aren't bearing yet), squash seeds (you can grow hulless ones; yields aren't great) - these all store passively at house temperature. Dairy (fresh or stored as hard cheese), meat (butchered fresh for poultry and groundhogs [which are a lovely spring treat - just as they're destroying your garden], pressure canned, or frozen if you use a freezer), eggs (can be stored unwashed to preserve the cuticle in a root cellar for 6 months if your birds stop laying the winter)
Fat: poppy seed oil, butter, rendered animal fats

Vegetables/fruits provide all kinds of great vitamins and minerals and fancy health-promoting phytochemicals, as well as much-needed fibre and, for some, a significant amount of carbohydrate or protein. 

The first thing to do is to push the growing season on either end so you don't have to store things. In the fall, that means cold-hardy greens like mustards, tat soi, escarole, parsley, and kale, in cold frames if you want. In the spring, you can get a bit of a start on greens with cold frames, but the real stars are perennials that come up wonderfully early: Caucasian mountain spinach (a vine, not spinach at all), garden sorrel, and asparagus. Lambsquarters gets growing early in the year and makes a wonderful nutritious green that you don't have to plant! If you're eating a lot of these foods, you might want to leach the anti-nutritional oxalic acid by boiling and discarding the water.

Passive storage:
In Ontario we can grow three species of squash: Cucurbita pepo, C. moschata, and C. maxima. They all store in the same conditions that you like in the winter: dry and moderately warm. Stick them on top of cupboards, under end tables, on bookshelves, on special-built storage racks, up one side of the stairs, behind the couch (help! we're being flooded!). Pepos last until end of January or a bit later, most moschatas until May or June, and maximas (I hear) can last for a year or two, depending on the variety. Onions and garlic also store in house conditions. Tomatoes picked before frost and without blight can last quite a while too. This last year, we ate our last fresh tomatoes on Christmas. Not quite as tasty as fresh, but not bad.
Lots of "root" crops (they're not all real roots) store beautifully in a root cellar. For most of them, it's because they're biennial and they're waiting to get through the winter to set seed. It's just that where they came from, winter wasn't quite so harsh as here.Carrots, beets, winter radishes, turnips, rutabagas, kohlrabi, parsnips and, if you're adventurous, Jerusalem artichoke, salsify, and scorzonera. If you eat those brassicas, there's no need to worry about vitamin C - kohlrabi packs a daily dose in just 100 grams!Apples! but separately from other foods to avoid ethylene problems. How long these last all depends on varieties and storage conditions. Around here, usually the best is into January or February.

Dehydrated:Greens (especially lambsquarters, but also kale and chard), green beans, tomatoes, zucchini (wonderful texture), winter squash just before they spoil if you have too many, mushrooms (for some species, if you put them in the sun, this is a great source of winter vitamin D, which is almost impossible to get enough of from sunlight), apples, and any other fruits you have.Dried passively for seasonings:Lots of herbs, coriander, hot peppers, calendula flowers, sumac, spicebush if you have it.

Canned:Tomatoes, salsa, hot pepper pickles, green beans (pickled in vinegar so you can water-bath safely - makes a tasty salad), fruits, and juices.
Sugar: maple syrup (canned) and honey (neighbours produce these).

I find the suggestions of fasting, above, interesting. Certainly eating a bit more when food is plentiful and a bit less when it's not could help even things out without turning to storage, but I find that the staple foods are the easiest to store year-round and I would certainly not want to eat a diet that's all staples - that seems like a recipe for malnutrition. Also, unless you go into winter somewhat overweight, you could at most fast for a month (give or take a few weeks) - not a complete solution to the problem of winter. Intuitively, I wouldn't think you get anything "for free" - if you fast, that means you need to eat more later to build back up to a normal body fat, so you still need to obtain that food sometime. I'm curious - does anyone have experience with using fasting as a means of significant reduction of overall food consumption?

Snow ice cream!!!  haha.  no, but seriously...potatoes, carrots, garlic and onions.  This is a good base and you can add in what you have preserved.

David Wieland wrote:
Regarding bread, I wonder where the idea of bread being a complete food comes from. It certainly doesn't provide  complete protein, and it's potentially dangerous to diabetics.

Excuse my French, David. [I am French, so bear with me...].
The French call it "pain complet", [complete bread] meaning made with the whole grain [usually wheat] but also rye etc. ground into flour. And that is what was given to prisoners at the Bastille and in pretty much every prison in the French kingdom.
Prisoners were *not* given any protein like you and I understand protein: a juicy burger. The reasons were that, as convicts, they were being punished, also ,meat is much more expensive and finally, it was thought [at the time]that meat makes a man mean.
Bread was, and for many still is the only burger extender: It is commonly used in France and other places to "sop up" the gravy and all the good meat juices. We had a slice at every meal, on the side.
But bread *does* have protein, and a person can subsist for years and years eating nothing else. I'm sure prisoners who stayed locked up for decades would have preferred some variety, but they lived, sometimes 20 years.
Bread is made from flour, water, yeast, and salt, and it also contains protein, fiber, carbohydrates, and other nutrients.
Protein
The main proteins in wheat are glutenins and gliadins, which make up about 75–85% of the grain's total protein.
The amount of protein in bread varies by type, with whole-wheat bread having the most.
Bread types and protein content:
Ezekiel: 5 g of protein per slice
Multigrain: 4.99 g of protein per slice
Whole-wheat: 3.97 g of protein per slice
Oat: 3.12 g of protein per slice
Sourdough: 3 g of protein per slice
Rye: 2.72 g of protein per slice
White: 2.57 g of protein per slice
For comparison, one serving of protein is between 15-30 grams depending on how much physical work a person does, so about 5 g. per slice, 3 meals, gives you the 15 grams needed to just exist in a cell.
I really feel for folks who can't have wheat due to celiac disease, but I believe that [b]this sickness is a disease of the times[/b].
We didn't use to have so many autoimmune diseases, such a celiac, which, as you may know is a chronic autoimmune disorder where the body's immune system damages the small intestine in response to consuming gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye, and barley.
Add to this that in order to maximize yield, we have impoverished the protein content  of wheat, so today's wheat has less protein than a couple of centuries ago.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9322029/#:~:text=Analyses%20of%20'ancient'%20and%20',for%20health%20and%20better%20tolerance.
I would not recommend eating nothing but bread, but it's doable.