How fresh is fresh?
The modern food network is pretty incredible. Bananas from South America, cucumbers from Kenya, lamb from New Zealand. Our supermarket baskets are full of freshness, grown on the fields of fertile farmland and handpicked just days before by a sun kissed farmer. How lovely (or so we thought).
Most of us have some basic knowledge about where our food comes from. Normally a highly automated mega-farm, in an unpronounceable country. Some even know that with certain foods (like meat & fish) the time between slaughter and it arriving on your plate can be significant.
However I’m sure almost no one knows just how unfresh a ‘fresh’ item truly is.
Bread
If your name is Jamie Oliver and you’ve made your own bread, you’ll know a loaf starts to dry & harden within hours. This is bad for a supermarket as they generally make enough stock to last a 2-3 days (and who wants a nasty hard loaf?) Of course you get certain bread which lasts up to 10 days (thanks to preservatives) but surely the ‘made in store’ stuff is fresh? Nope
Most loafs are portioned and even partly baked off-site up to 3 days before arriving at your local supermarket. They are then given an final turn in an oven and called ‘fresh.’
Fruit
This is a big one. Now yes as most of the fruit we eat in the UAE is imported, it won’t of been picked yesterday. So you must be thinking that the American apple you’re eating is at worst a couple of weeks old? Try 6 months.
Modern supermarkets pick their fruits & stockpile them just before they are ripe. They then refrigerate them and send them to a giant warehouse where they sit in a state of limbo. When needed they pump ethylene gas to kick start the ripening and bobs your uncle.
Vegetables
The UAE imports almost all its vegetables from overseas. And yes thanks to air freight some vegetables like green beans & broccoli from Africa can be in our baskets in as little as 10 days.
However there’s a chance that the jacket potato you've eaten for lunch is over 6 months old. And leafy plants such as salad & spinach up to 4 weeks since harvesting thanks to Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) & washed in chlorine to slow down rotting. Yuck!
Juice
Fresh Juice is made of fruit, right? Better then swigging a soft drink? Be cautious!
From Concentrate (+1 year shelf life) - A large majority of juices come from concentrate – a syrupy substance that’s been filtered, pasteurised, evaporated and frozen. Add water and more heat and you get what distantly resembles juice (without any of the nutritional benefits).
Not from concentrate (2 weeks) - This juice comes from fruit which is then rapidly heated to kill any nasty pathogens (a process called pasteurisation). This bumps up the shelf life to 2 weeks but like ‘from-concentrate’ juice, the process has a nasty habit of killing all the goodness.
The same is truth for milk – pasteurised to kill any goodness in the quest for a longer shelf life.
Is anything fresh?
Food is a business at the end of the day. It works on selling as much as possible and wasting as little as possible. It is in a supermarket’s interest to make sure the stuff they sell looks, smells and tastes as good as we the customer expect – for as long as possible.
Truth is nothing beats growing & picking your own fruit & veg from a home garden. However for 99.9% of us who have lives, this is not a realistic solution.
The Alternatives
Support your local farmer – Despite the other plantery weather we have in the UAE, there are several great farms producing fruit & veg. Weather its organic or natural foods many of these farm will home deliver or attend weekly markets in the city, great for replacing your weekly shop. And they are fresh – less then a week old!
Buy in season – Strawberries don't grow in winter! Therefore don't buy them in wrong parts of the year. Print out a seasonal calendar of fruit & veg and stick it on your refrigerator. You’ll buy fresher foods and eat produce with lower picking-to-plate times.
Pick by date – Being trialled in the USA, supermarkets are printing ‘picked by’ dates on their fruit & veg in a subconscious effort to stock more seasonal produce. It’s the idea that if a customer knows how long ago a fruit was picked, they will adjust their buying habits accordingly towards fresher (& more seasonal) produce.