Just one? It would be very difficult to pick just one.

One I've made a few times this winter is a piglet roast (no, not whole. Those piglets, whole, would fetch 300$/piece). It's a bit of a luxury because those piglets are pretty exclusive. They raisethem in very small numbers, and 90% go to chefs in high end restaurants (they're highly sought after by chefs on the East coast and northern states, the rest fetches a real fortune in high end Tokyo groceries). Anyway, there's only one butcher who has them, and which parts depend on what the chefs have left that week.

I usually oven bake it, braised with apple cider (and a small glass of calvados, when I have it), and a brunoise (that's just the classic French broth base: onion/celery/carrots) with chopped artisan bacon. Later on, I had beans that slowly cook in the broth. It cooks slowly. It's so delicate and tender you don't need a knife to eat it. It's like perfect rib meat, but without the fat.

Simple, but a tad pricey. It's what I do with meat now. I cut down severely on how many meals a week I will eat meat at, but use the money saved to buy us much higher quality meat. I also try to do my own terrines/pâtés/sausages nowadays. It's really very simple once you get the knack of it (and when you have a good butcher), and I totally control what goes in them.

I do try to stick mostly to local meat. We have some of the best pork in the world, and great lamb (not as good as Wales's stuff but close). We have excellent duck, and great chicken and all sort of odder birds. Beef we raised in small quantity, and the good stuff is very expensive. What I eat comes from a small scale farm in Vermont, then it's dried aged by my butcher for almost a year. Now, that's beef (it makes BBQ fans nuts) - it melts in the mouth and it's amazingly tasty. But I don't have it very often ($$$!!) and mostly grilled. Buffalo is a good alternative to beef ( here, that is). I systematically use buffalo or ostricht when it's ground meat (not exactly true, I make a mean duck burger). Then there's deer, etc. None of that is very cheap (and I sure don't judge anyone who can't buy that stuff), but I can pinpoint on a map where any meat I buy comes from, know how it's raised, what they eat and all that, and I've come to value that a lot.

I have to make larger concessions for fish.

Roughly, I try hard to adapt what we eat to the seasons, and whatever I can do myself, I do myself. I'm just not maniacal about it. I have mustard (French-style, the real stuff!), but ketchup, BBQ sauces, mayonnaise and all that, I make at home. I need tzatziki, I get cucumbers, garlic and yogurt and that's it. We want pizza, it takes 5 min and 30 min of waiting to make the dough myself. Sure, the few first times it's trickier, but you get the twist and it's no big deal.

And I definitely avoid tasteless winter tomatoes, asparagus and such. For the month and a half when we have local asparagus, well.. I eat a whole lot of them. Before I'm sick of them, they're gone. Same for berries, and tomatoes and most of the rest. My summers and falls are very, very veggie heavy.

I have to cheat in winter (root veggies, onions and squash and beans are all well and good, but it gets old), but not that much. I use preserves when I can, a bit of frozen stuff. It just means we won't have those nice salads of fresh tomatoes and basil in January and the tomato dishes I make through winter have baked tomatoes or sauces. It's nothing outlandish, most people had to do that 'til the mid fifties and more, then the big innovation was that they could use industrially made preserved.. which gradually increased in sodium content and additives over the decades and are basically no good anymore.

I do a lot of my work from home too, it means I can put something in the oven whenever I wish. It simplifies things for sure (though most cooking is done in 30 min. or so at supper time), but when I know I'll work 9-6 out of home for a stretch, I just get organized, freeze meals and such. I've always loved to cook, but I've also practiced enough that it's no longer a burden or a chore. I try my best not to use recipes (though I have a ton of cookbooks...). They really lose you time (all this measuring and such for nothing.. most dishes don't require precision), and block people from developing kitchen instincts and self-confidence. They're mostly good for inspiration.

If it's all they're willing to eat, I guess so. Just diminishing the amounts imported fresh would still be good.

There's really a whole lot of things you can use good quality frozen fruits for, though. They make decent fruit salads, and are perfect to mix in yogurt and such.

But if people insist on just biting in fresh fruits, I guess it's better they do.

It's also a matter of taste. I don't enjoy much the fresh fruits we get in winter. I'm sure California strawberries are just fine locally. Those we get in winter are terrible. Flawless, perfect looking fruits, but they taste NOTHING. They barely have any strawberry taste and zero sweetness. I try my best to stick to local stuff, frozen stuff, preserves and juices in winter. In summer and fall, we have plenty of local fruits. When I'm lucky, I get a basket of Florida oranges from relatives or friends. With greenish spots and all, but oh so good.

One advantage to eat seasonal food is that by the time they come around you massively crave them, so I think they're just far more enjoyable in those conditions.

But as I said, it's not hard rules. We cheat whenever we feel like it, and I've got plenty of imported products to cook with (Japanese, Indian, Mexican and whatnot). I'm a very moderate "locavore", and it's very driven by the fact it's just more enjoyable for me this way.

It would definitely take a lot of education/convincing to change those mentalities so ingrained for a few decades now. Tons of people don't even remember when Florida oranges were still too expensive to buy in winter (and they had green spots!). It would require getting out the shabbier, cheaper frozen products out of the groceries too. The really good stuff like Europe's Best (a local company.. the rest is just a name) is not cheap, but still much cheaper than out of season "fresh" fruits. They're not all mushy when you unfreeze them, too.

Or maybe not. Some things we get from fruits are hard to replace otherwise.

One solution to this which starts appearing is urban gardening. Not home based but commercial. We have all those massive, flat-roofed buildings. People are starting to make commercial farms on them. Year-long. There may come a time when many cities grow a fair percentage of their own veggies and fruits locally. Quite a few believe urban farming is the way of the future.

We're luckier for tomatoes. It used to be just the same way you describe (and for most tomatoes it still is), but we have one local producer that somehow manages to grow quite good greenhouse tomatoes through the year. They're not as good as farmers' market tomatoes or summer tomatoes, but still quite tasty, enough to buy them from time to time. In summer they have a ton of varieties, in winter they stick to 2 varieties of small tomatoes that do well in the greenhouses with winter light.

In summer I simply grow my own.

Most definitely. Customers are largely responsible for this. If people really wanted unwaxed fruits or unevenly orange oranges, the producers would be happy to get them to us.

As of now, people will almost systematically pick the "less good veggie" that's perfect looking over the good stuff if you offer both in groceries. You also start to see really appalling stuff. A friend of mine was on vacations in SC. We're not yet invaded by pre-cut stuff here, and most people avoid them, which he did in the US too. Quite a few times he said the cashier had to ask him what the heck the whole veggie he was buying was. Not all that special stuff.. like cauliflower. She told him she didn't know they came in such big size and that they had that. It took him a while to figure out she had no idea what a whole cauliflower looked like! He thought she was a unique case, until that happened againwith another cashier, and again. Frightening.

It got talked about a lot when it came out. But library case as I said (it's over 500$, and on the whole it's mostly for professional cooks. But the very long discussion of the food industry in book 1, its history and processes and all the science is amazing. It also gets you through most additives and such, and has a whole section on food contamination, bacteria and such. It's not a very easy read, it's very science heavy.

It makes you very skeptical. It's not very kind to the FDA either, which they accuse of often to making scientifically sound decisions and fooling people into believing they are (such as recommended cooking temperatures, which are quite needlessly high and oversimplifying the whole matter (it's always a combination of heat + duration + thickness, and bacteria stays on the surface unless you ground it or chop it and bring them inside (deboning and chopping a chicken or piece of beef hours before cooking it = bad idea). The truth is if the meat isn't contaminated or just a little, you don't need to overcook it, and depending on the cut it's just the surface you need to cook long enough, which depends on the temperature. If it's badly contaminated, even their recommendations won't be enough and you'll get sick. So there's basically no scientifically good reason to overcook and it's there solely to appease old fright (and now it's how most Americans like their meat.. .but beef). They also spread this notion that chicken and pork are somehow more dangerous, but eating badly cooked beef is however ok. It's total BS. Ground beef, any meat processed this way, is a health hazard (more than even a tartare, cut at the last minute by knife), far more than any undercooked chicken or steak.

It discusses the spinach thing, by the way. They say the FDA destroyed tons and tons needlessly just to appease a food fright. The sensible thing to do would have been to cook and freeze those spinach (you could not just trust a FDA instructions for customers to cook spinach from that producer that week, not even with a special label), but if that had been recycled for precooked spinach it would have been 100% safe to eat.

Indeed, and the more you do it, the more skilled you become and the less time consuming it becomes.

A lot of countries are beginning to realize it was a really bad idea to let the cooking skills vanish. It's considered apparently quite dire in the US (and to hear the likes of Jamie Oliver, it's the same in the UK), but it's becoming true even in countries reputed for their cooking (France, for instance. It's behind the US and still more present in urban areas, the North-American style groceries with all the processed food took a few more decades to spread there, but since they did the cooking skills have degraded and fast. The average frenchman being a good home cook might become a myth between a few more generations at the present rate, though they're starting to react.).

It's what I fear too, healthcare costs going up and life expectancy going down in a few decades. But there will be so many more factors than just food. We'll see, if we're still there!