Buying By Feel Beats Buying By Label Every Time

Your hands know more about a vegetable than any sign above the crate.

Good buying is a physical skill and it takes about three market trips to learn. Pick things up. A vegetable that is heavy for its size is full of water and therefore fresh, and this holds true for everything from a cabbage to a lemon. Squeeze gently at the shoulder of a root and feel for firmness with no give. Look at the cut end where the leaves were trimmed: it should look recently severed rather than dried out and browned. Look at the stem end of a fruiting vegetable, which is where the tiredness shows first, long before the body of it looks tired.

Season is the other half of it, and the clue is usually the price and the volume. When something is genuinely in season locally, there is a lot of it, it is cheap, and it is piled high rather than laid out in a careful single layer. That is the week to cook it repeatedly and to learn what it does. Out of season, the same vegetable travels further, is picked earlier, and has less to give, so it needs more help from the pan. Buying with the season is not a moral position, it is just where the good produce is.

Buy less, more often, if your life allows it. Vegetables are perishable by design and every day of storage costs you something. A smaller basket bought twice a week almost always eats better than a full one bought fortnightly, and it wastes far less. If your shopping has to be weekly, sequence it: cook the delicate leaves and soft fruiting vegetables in the first days, and lean on the roots, the brassicas and the alliums later in the week, because those are built to wait.