There is a definite, and usually short, season when most fruits and vegetables are ripe, but they are in the stores every day, all year. I guess they can grow tomatoes in hothouses, but what about apples and oranges? Or even broccoli or lettuce?
Do they just keep them refrigerated for months until they’re in the store? And if so, how come when I put an apple in the crisper, it’s mushy after a few weeks?
Usually they come from other parts of the world. I have been buying blueberries from Chile recently, I think.
Apples are pretty much stored long-term and doled out over the course of the year. I think most other things are grown elsewhere or grown in greenhouses. (Around here, we get Michigan greenhouse-grown tomatoes starting in March.) Most produce should have a sign there or a label on it telling you where it’s from, so that’ll give you an idea.
As FH said, things like apples and potatoes can be stored for a very long time. Often the fresh apple you are eating was picked months ago, I believe potatoes can be stored (under proper conditions) for close to a year before it hits your plate (but I could be off on that one).
As for summer fruits (peaches, plumes, nectarines etc), those usually come from South America during the winter.
To add to what others have said, remember that the seasons are reversed in the southern and northern hemispheres. Chile’s summer is the US’s winter.
Which raises a follow-up question: folks in the Southern hemisphere, do you enjoy Georgia peaches in July?
I never understood why the stone fruit (cherries, plums, peaches) sold in US at this time of year only come from Chile. Isn’t it also summer in Argentina, Brazil, etc?
Why on earth are you putting your apples in the fridge? Stop that.
They’re temperate-climate fruits. Most of Brazil is in the tropics. Most of temperate Argentina is in the Pampas or Patagonia, which are too dry for fruit trees, and the eastern slope of the Andes in this region is also pretty dry. So in South America only Chile has a temperate climate that is wet enough for extensive cultivation of fruit trees.
Potato chip companies in Minnesota use potatoes dug last fall and stored for several months, up to about February or March. If they’re lucky, these last until they can buy potatoes shipped in from the first crops from warm states like Florida.
When I worked for SuperValu, I once toured one of their fruit & vegetable storage facilities. It was early summer, but they still had racks filled with boxes of apples, from the previous fall’s harvest (more than usual; that had been a very good year for apples locally.) These were stored under very careful conditions. Not only temperature, but also humidity, lighting, & air circulation. That is probably lacking in your refrigerator.
Cool. Thank you for the explanation. (However, while I appreciate that Chilean stone fruit is available now, I’ve always been disappointed by what I’ve tried in the past. So I’ve made a point not to buy it, but to wait for the local produce, even though it’s going to be at least a couple of months before I can get it.)
When it comes to apples, we locavore until the local orchard runs out in late winter. Good prces on good apples. I saw a sign today for ''vine ripened Florida tomatos. So it is a combination of stored and grown elsewhere. Many of the apples we are eating now came from the next state.
I don’t do it, because I don’t really eat apples, and when I do, I get through them all in a couple of days, but that really is how to keep them best.
Some produce is grown under glass/plastic with artificially controlled environmental conditions, lighting, etc - especially tomatoes and salads - this enables the productive season to be stretched, wherever in the world you do it.
It also probably doesn’t hurt that the United States and Chile have a free trade agreement, whereas no such agreement exists between the U.S. and either Argentina or Brazil.
Thanks for the link. I need to try keeping them in tupperware. Don’t know why I haven’t done it before, but I don’t buy apples that often.
It’s kind of strange, because everybody’s heard of tupperware (and I’m using the term generically), but most people don’t know how well it works when combined with refrigeration.
I had always heard, read, and experienced that you shouldn’t freeze fresh bread, because the texture gets crappy. But when I was living in Houston several years ago, the summers were so hot and humid that bread stored at room temp got moldy after just a few days, and out of desperation I bought a big heavy plastic tupperware thingy just the size of a loaf of bread, and tried keeping it in the freezer. Damn if the bread wasn’t better than new, even after two or three weeks in the freezer, if I just zapped it in the microwave for a few seconds.
It turns out it works in the fridge, too. Bread will last a couple weeks at least in a heavy refrigerated container. And a head of iceberg lettuce will stay crisp for a month in a tightly sealed refrigerated tupperware container.
The trick is that it has to be THICK, rigid plastic. Just a plastic bag or two won’t work, although once on vacation I tried it with like half a dozen thicker than usual plastic bags, and my bread stayed pretty fresh in the fridge for a week.