Eating meat is for winter

On principle, I only buy vegetables and fruit from my region with very few exceptions (lemon or some exotic thing if I'm curious). Even in peak season, this is difficult where I live, because increasingly my country is not producing any fruit and vegetables. Almost all the crops on the shopping isle come from Spain. Sometimes the Netherlands and for weird, inappropriate stuff out of the season (like asparagus in December) from the Southern hemisphere.

This time of the year it is even more difficult. You could grow some mustard salads, pak choi, bitter greens or forced endives. But practically no one does this in my country. So my fresh produce consists of root vegetables, onion and leek, pumpkin, and mushrooms. I allow myself to eat a bit more meat than I usually do for this reason too - and because meat is more in season in winter. (There's a certain beauty in that, as if we can allow ourself a bit more of the gold when it is the most dull).

I'm grateful to have a very seasonally aware butcher as a colleague. I bought some bacon he made today. He told me that we've gotten meat eating wrong in a lot of ways and practically no one thinks about the seasons when they think about meat. The few exceptions like eating lamb around easter (påskelam) are indicative. Slaughtering lambs in spring is the worst time of the year, he tells me. The best time to eat lamb would be fall.

In late spring and summer, we probably shouldn't eat any meat at all. Save the lucky cut of summer deer if there are hunters in your community. But summer is vegetables and fruit galore. Eating more meat in winter makes sense. You slaughter animals before the dormant season. There's less to eat outside. The animals have spent the whole season fattening up. It's time to harvest, cure the meat, smoke it over fire (fire being a constant source of joy in winter where I come from). In fact, where I come from an old name for November is slaughter month (slagtemåned). If ducks aren't slaughtered before mid-november, they put up a new plumage which is much more difficult to pluck. Our most food-focused traditions are in winter. I think the winterness of meat is a big reason.

The meat is the gold of the pantry.