Fresh or Frozen

I'm a big fan of frozen veg.

The thing about it is that frozen veg is ripe when it is harvested and therefore has drawn maximum goodness from its environment and it is then frozen very quickly so very little chance to lose that natural given goodness.

Ripening before harvest is why vine ripened tomatoes taste so much better than those flacid horrid things in the "Value" pack.

Food that is harvested and not frozen will often ripen after it has been picked, when it has nothing but thin air to draw on for that process.

Don't beat yourself up about not buying fresh veg - think about how long it takes from picking to plate and how much of its nutritional value is lost in that process.

I'm a big fan of thinking about food miles and buying local.  I'm also a big proponent of buying British where you can.  It isn't just a political preference either - buying local food means that you are eating food stuffs which have the same environmental influences as you do and gives you the opportunity to buy fresher.  It isn't always possible of course - if you want asparagus in December, you're unlikely to get it just up the road.  For me though, that's when to turn to frozen.

I read an article the other day where they called people with this view point "localvores", I think I'm not unhappy with that label.

If you buy British frozen peas, they will have been flash frozen in minutes from being picked.  Let's think of what happens in winter when you buy fresh peas from say Chile.

They are picked in Chile and packed into boxes.  The boxes are then packed onto a lorry - no hurry, they have all day to fill the lorry.  The lorry then takes the peas to an airport, the drive takes several hours.  They wait at the airport to be loaded onto a plane, whilst various checks are made to make sure it really is a box of peas being transported and eventually they are loaded onto a plane.  It takes a while as there are other consignments to be shipped on the same plane.  Some hours later the plane takes off.  How many hours do you reckon it takes to fly from Chile to London (assuming of course that there isn't a change of plane at another Chilean airport because the first one was just a small local air strip) - let's say the trip takes 17 hours.

Then we have British customs and more paper work as the peas are unloaded.  Eventually they get put on a lorry and taken off to a big warehouse where they are repacked for the supermarket.  Then, once they've been repacked and some quality control checks have been undertaken, they are packed onto further lorries and sent out to distribution centres where they change lorry and get taken to your local Tesco, where some hours later they will eventually find their way to the food shelf.  Now take a look at those Chilean peas and see what the sell by date says - bet your last dollar it's more than a few days away.  So all in all if you are lucky from vine to plate that's likely to be at least a week, during which time many nutrients have faded away.

So next time you get out a packet of frozen peas - don't beat yourself up - congratulate yourself on choosing what is probably the healthier option!