WHY EAT SEASONAL?

Eating seasonal products is good for your health, your wallet and the environment. In addition to helping reduce CO2 emissions and support the sustainability of the earth, you consume products that have been harvested at their best moment of ripeness at a fair price and that favour local economy.

WHY THIS PROJECT?

It’s been decades that citizens of urban centers disconnected from the agricultural world and the natural rhythm of plants. Summer or winter, there’s always exotic fruits in the supermarkets stands. There are two methods to consume one type of fruit or vegetable during the whole year: importing it or cultivating it in a heated greenhouse. Both ways generate greenhouse gases, damaging more and more our environment. We have to get rid of this habit of eating anything anytime and go back to consume food like our grandparents used to do: following mother nature’s rhythm.

Now, how do we know what to eat and when? Searching for calendars on the web, we are confronted to a big blend of contradictory information. This project aims to produce a reliable, complete and as accurate a calendar as possible. The original objective was to develop several calendars depending on the area of cultivation, but because of a lack of data, we decided to develop a single calendar for the entire peninsula.

With this project, we want to provide a tool to support responsible consumption, limiting the excessive transport of food and cultivation in air-conditioned greenhouses.

METHODOLOGY

To create the calendar, we have contacted organizations and people in the agricultural world to tell us the seasons of products cultivated in their region. We have talked to farmers, consumer groups, agricultural observatories and organic production councils. We have collected the data through an Excel table and a Google Form survey.

For now, more than 20 farmers and organisations from various autonomous communities have taken part in the survey: Andalusia, Asturias, Extremadura, Madrid, Murcia, Navarre and the Basque Country. The form is accessible here and the collaboration of any person who has knowledge about the natural cycle of plants is appreciated. An average was calculated from all the results to create a single calendar that gathers information from all areas of the Spanish peninsula.

NEXT STEPS

Without doubt, the biggest problem we have faced so far is the lack of existing data and responses to the survey. Once enough responses have been collected from each region of the country, we will be able to develop a more accurate tool that will display seasonal products depending on the user’s location.

This is a collaborative, evolutionary and transparent project. Any doubt, complaint or comment will be welcome to improve the tool. Contact us.

The illustrations of the fruits and vegetables are under Creative Commons license and can be used freely citing the authors of the same. They can be downloaded [here] (https://github.com/soydetemporada/website/tree/master/ilustraciones-originales/color).