Vegetables and Fruit

For most of my life, I rarely ate vegetables, and didn't each much fruit. I'm now eating mostly organic produce, and I eat it more often, and I strive for the "local and in season" model for produce.

But I still have a lot of room for improvement.

I'll often have a banana, because they're yummy, convenient, and easy to eat. We get them from Pioneer Organics, which delivers a box of organic produce every week. I am careful to select local produce whenever possible, but bananas are never local to WA state. Also, they only ever have the Cavendish variety, which is at risk. I'd like to find a way to support biodiversty, by not eating so many Cavendish bananas. However, other types are not often available. Also, bananas are never local and in season in WA state, so I would do well to eat other fruits instead. I remind myself that monocultures are good for multinational corporations and diseases, and diversity is good for the little guy.

Fruits have quite a lot of sugar in them, but at least it's unrefined. My body recognizes that sugar as a sign that these are good to eat, and sure enough, they are full of nutrients. Especially because I am pretty strict about eating only organic fruit. Non-organic fruit is worse in a lot of ways (poisons affect the farmers, the fields, and me; fertilizers allow overfarming, resulting in produce that lacks nutrients and spoils more quickly; organic produce must sell on taste, because it cannot sell on appearance, so it tastes better). However, as we head in to autumn, there are fewer and fewer local and in season fruits.

I would like to find a variety of real vegetables that I like to eat. I say "real" because so many of the foods we think of as vegetables are really fruits: zucchini, tomatoes, bell peppers. We like them because they're sweet; they're sweet because they're fruit. They still have nutrients, but the sugar:nutrient ratio is going to be better in, say, spinach than, say, cucumber.