Radish to romanesco: A year in vegetables

Ceren Dolma

Hi there! Ceren here, from Datawrapper’s Support team. This week, I’m unpacking the contents of a vegetable subscription I’ve been receiving for the past year.

Growing up in Southeastern Turkey, my mother and I had a weekly ritual: every Thursday, we went to a pazar, an open-air market filled with fresh produce, spices, and all sorts of goods. Food always comes from nearby farms there, so by default, you are always eating whatever is in season. Over the years, I’ve internalised many ideas about what to eat when: no aubergines or strawberries in winter, or you’ll be disappointed – and if you’re craving oranges, you’ll have to wait until winter.

While pazars are still going strong, you can find many foreign or off-season foods in grocery stores these days. And where I now live in Ireland, the closest thing to a pazar is St. George’s Market — which is more of a tourist spot. So in an effort to eat more seasonally and locally, I signed up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) scheme about a year ago. Since then, I’ve received weekly or biweekly deliveries of fresh produce directly from a farm about half an hour away from where I live.

What I’ve received

Although my CSA box offers a lot of variety, some vegetables appear more consistently than others. Every Tuesday, I get an email listing what will arrive on Thursday. Let’s dig into what I’ve received thus far!

As we can see, potatoes and garlic steal the show; they’re always in the box. That’s because I paid for them to be an add-on that I receive every week. The bulk of the ever-changing content is onions, carrots, beetroots, as well as tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce. I’ve been having a lot of soups and salads!

When I’ve received it

Now that we know about the number of vegetables in total, let’s break it down by months to see how they compare to what is considered in season by Bord Bia, Irish Food Board:

I also got vegetables outside of their Irish season. That’s because while most vegetables in my box are grown, harvested, and packed on the nearby farm itself, they also partner with other organic farms across Europe to fill gaps – especially as a safeguard against an unpredictable climate. This international collaboration, along with agricultural techniques like polytunnels and greenhouses which can extend the growing season by 6 weeks on either end, means the availability of the vegetables depends less on the seasons: I’ve received kale in May and June instead of in autumn; and tomatoes and courgettes a bit too early in March.

But for the majority of the time, the availability of a vegetable aligns with what is considered in season in Ireland. Carrots, beetroots and onions are available consistently, and others such as cabbage, chard, and kohlrabi are delivered intermittently across seasons. Bok choy, cauliflower and radish have only been showing up in spring; while vegetables classified as fruits were mostly available in the spring and summer.

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

– the former Ireland rugby captain Brian O’Driscoll

But with just one year of data, we don’t know if the above is reflective of a long-term pattern, a one-off anomaly, or a signifier of a shift in seasonality – so maybe I will just have to continue being a subscriber for a couple of more years and pay this Weekly Chart a revisit.

That’s it from me this time. If you have any recipes you love that use some of the vegetables above, please send them my way! Next week, I will be getting carrots, onions, leeks, greens, celeriac, mushrooms, parsnips, and beetroots – and you will be hearing from our developer Toni.

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Ceren Dolma

(she/her, @ceren_do) is a part of the support and customer success team. She is a cartographer by trade and has found her way into data vis by way of making maps to tell stories. Outside of work, she likes to read, teach yoga, go bouldering, and she is most recently learning tricks with hula hoops. Ceren lives in Belfast.

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