If It Grows Together, It Goes Together

Seasonal Eating Guide: Fall Edition

Welcome to the Fall Edition of the Seasonal Eating Guide, from your year-round farmers market! 

To make the most of Fall foods, this segment of the Fall Guide starts off with an ancient piece of agricultural wisdom: if it grows together, it goes together. Based on that, we’ve got lots of advice that will make it easy to get the most out of local Fall foods.

For more insights and tips on seasonal eating, be sure to check out the Fall Guide’s other segments:

• How to Get Your Healthy On – for You & the Ecosystem takes a closer look at how eating seasonally puts your body in sync with what Mother Nature provides, season by season. 

• It’s Soup Season! goes on a deep dive into Fall’s number one comfort food, complete with recipes, including bone broth.

• Farmer Spotlight introduces you to the young Amish family of Spring Creek Meadows, who rely on manpower, horses, and regenerative farming practices to raise their livestock. 
• Benefits & Uses of Fall’s Produce Powerhouses lists Fall favorites, their nutritional benefits, harvest time, and the different ways they can be used.

Time-tested Wisdom

Indigenous people in the Americas knew the truth of that old saying, “if it grows together, it goes together.” They planted the Three Sisters crops together: beans, squash, and corn. 

As the corn grew tall, the beans would climb it like a pole. Meanwhile the sprawling squash became a ground-cover, shading the soil, conserving moisture, and protecting the bean stems.

Grown together, these Summer and early Fall foods put nutrients back in the soil. Eaten together they provide the building blocks for important amino acids our bodies don’t produce. 

Local, in-season foods just naturally go together. Add walnuts to baby spinach and the omega-3 fatty acids in the nuts will increase the absorption of the spinach’s vitamin K.

Fall foods taste great together, too — turnips roasted with sweet potatoes; kale tossed in a salad with pears; fennel sprinkled on cooked apples, beets, or potatoes.

5 More Tips to Make the Most of Fall Foods

Now here are 5 more healthy tips that make it easy to cook and eat fresh, local Fall foods together, the way nature intended.

• In the Winter we eat less cold, raw food and more hot, cooked food. CLEAN YOUR OVEN so you can start the season without setting off your smoke detectors.
• Start eating FRUITS AND VEGGIES HIGH IN VITAMINS A & C. They boost your immune system so it’s good and strong for fighting off the germ attacks of cold and flu season. Add greens like kale and collards to smoothies, soups, and pasta dishes.
  •  Other A and C rockstars this season include apples, cabbage, carrots, sweet potatoes, beets, parsnips, hard Winter squashes, celery, celeriac, broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts. Many of these contain more vitamin C than oranges!
• You’ll get some of the fat your body needs when you SNACK ON SEEDS AND NUTS, which contain healthy fats. Cook with healthy fats like coconut oil, olive oil, flaxseed oil, and walnut oil. And save those seeds you scoop out of butternut and acorn squashes!

• • Toss them in olive oil (don’t waste time picking out those strands that come with them, the strands will shrivel in the heat).
  • Spread them on a baking sheet loosely covered with foil.
  • Roast them at about 400 degrees until they start to pop. (The foil keeps them from flying around inside your oven.) Stir them and keep an eye on them. 
  • Once they’re brown, take them out, sprinkle with salt, and start snacking!
    
    
• EAT WHOLE GRAINS such as brown rice, quinoa, millet, barley, and whole wheat breads. Their dietary fiber aids healthy digestion. Whole grains are also full of iron for healthy blood, antioxidants to keep your cells healthy, and B vitamins to give you energy.
• MAKE A HOMEMADE, NUTRITIOUS STOCK OR BROTH to use in soups, stews, and sauces – the ultimate Fall comfort foods! Check out It’s Soup Season! for great soup recipes, including immune-boosting bone broth.

Fall is here and Winter will soon be upon us. Now’s the time to start giving your body the Fall foods it needs!