Vegetables

Are we slated to be the last generation to savour the new, fresh tastes of spring? Is modem science, in giving us year-round bounty, robbing us of the taste sensations of the first tender asparagus, the delicate flavour and texture of fresh garden peas, and the crisp raw delights of tiny radishes, baby cucumbers and little new carrots?

Today, the season of everything has been stretched, so that if we were to prepare a calendar of when the majority of fruits and vegetables were available in the markets, our list would undoubtedly extend from end to end of the year. Gas-stored fruit from all over the world is on sale the year round, vegetables are frozen as soon as they are picked, even game is popped into deep-freeze by amateurs, so that what were the delights of a few weeks of the year now rumble on, half unnoticed, from January to December.