Frozen, not the Disney movie. Did you know that the vast majority of frozen vegetables and frozen fruit are processed within 2 days of harvest? Yes. Store-bought frozen veggies and fruit are days more fresh than almost anything in the fresh produce department. How so?
Once picked. produce designated for fresh purchase is sorted for perfection or lack thereof according to very limited criteria. (We don’t buy bruised fruit or semi-misshaped veggies in grocery stores.) Sorting and packaging the goods – that’s a day. Produce is then trucked across the country. Depending on where you live, if the lettuce came from California and you live in Washington, DC or Maine, it’s three days in a refrigerated truck. The truck delivers the goods to a central receiving location where various grocery store buyers purchase crates of goods and arrange for further trucking to their central distribution unit. Then, one more time, the goods are loaded onto trucks going to the store near you. All together, days from being picked to you picking it up in the grocery store is not less than 5 days and could easily be 8. Then, it sits on the grocery store shelves until it’s in your fridge.
Frozen veggies and fruits are processed very quickly. A little misshapen or bruised, no problem. Frozen goods are usually sold as chopped or cut in some way, so the broken or bruised is set aside for making big batch broths or jams. It is too costly to store unprocessed produce, so it is processed. The bagged frozen goods can be on the same truck as the fresh, but the frozen is already done – flash frozen almost straight from the field.
So, the truth is, if fresh for nutritional content is your desire, frozen is best. Organic, of course: for you, your family, the farmers, the soil and water.
Frozen veggies are already chopped. Yay! Some days, it’s unsafe for me to even look at the kitchen knife!
Then, there’s freezing fresh from garden for when the garden is asleep in winter. In addition to various vegetables easily frozen, this year I started freezing whole fronds of herbs in bundles for chopping into soups, legume stews, and dhals. This bundle is spinach and parsley. My favorite flavor bomb is garden fresh dill, parsley, spinach or chard, and full-size arugula. Roll them in a paper towel (bamboo, if possible), then put several rolls in one plastic bag, then into the freezer. Use as needed.
I just coarsely chop 1/3 oe 1/2 of an herb bundle and throw it in the pot. Big yum!
This can be done with store produce also. Have fun!
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