Seasonal Eating in Italy: Strawberries Belong to May

Shortly after I moved to Italy from Canada, I found myself in a rural cascina, a farmhouse,

hungry for fresh fruit and scanning for strawberries. It was November. In Toronto, I could buy

strawberries year-round — pale and watery in winter, perhaps, but always there, wrapped in

plastic and flown from far away.

Fruit market in Sicily. Photo credit: Isola Chambers

There, in the Lombardy countryside, the farmer gave me a look somewhere between bemused

and impatient. “Fragole? Beh, devi tornare a maggio,” he said, as if it were obvious. Strawberries

belong to May, not to November.

That small exchange caught me off guard. It made me feel… entitled. Of course, if I had

searched through a big supermarket I almost surely would have found imported strawberries. But

that would have missed the point. And it certainly isn’t the Italian norm. Markets move with the

rhythm of the seasons. If it isn’t rapini’s time in your region, you don’t eat rapini. The rule is

unspoken yet firm. Yes, it can be frustrating. Yes, it took some time to adjust to. But as the

months have passed here in Italy, I have begun to see it differently: not as limitation, but as a way

of living in step with time and nature itself.

Flooded rice field in Lombardy. Photo credit: Isola Chambers

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So many of us in this modern moment are trained for immediacy. Almost anything can be

ordered on demand: food, packages, entertainment, conversation. Mangoes in February;

asparagus in December; strawberries all year long.

For me, Italy has disrupted those habits. Eating here is tied to patience. You wait for what the

land gives, and, when it arrives, you celebrate it. The first figs in late summer feel like an event;

porcini mushrooms in autumn send families into the woods with baskets. Meals become seasonal

markers, edible ways of keeping time.

It feels a little like hearing your favorite song play on the radio compared to our oh-so-frequent

sequence of choosing a song, searching it, and pressing play on Spotify. The joy isn’t only in the

song itself, but in the waiting, the surprise, the way it breaks into an ordinary moment. Seasonal

eating works the same way: the wait sharpens the pleasure, and anticipation becomes part of the

nourishment.

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Eating seasonally is also eating regionally. The philosophy has a name: chilometro zero —

kilometer zero — meaning food that comes from as close to home as possible. It’s not a passing

trend here, it’s simply how things are done.

On the sea, people eat anchovies, clams, and swordfish pulled from the water that morning.

Drive just five kilometers inland, and the menu changes to wild boar and mushrooms. The food

doesn’t come to you; you go to the food. The craving changes direction. It is no longer a demand

placed on the land, but a hunger shaped by what the land offers in its own time.

Though I grew up in Canada, my mother is Italian. When I visited my nonna as a child, in her house on the Tyrrhenian coast, our meals came almost entirely from the sea. On the rare evening when she craved something different, something with a capital M — meat — it meant driving up

into the mountains, winding along narrow, nerve-inducing roads, until we found a trattoria

serving food from la terra instead of il mare.

If I ever suggested that we might be able to find ragù, sausages, or boar in our bustling seaside town, the response was always the same:

“Ma non si fa… al mare si mangia pesce.”

Get it into your head, little one. On the sea you eat fish.

Grandparent and child on the Tuscan sea. Photo credit: Isola Chambers

——

As a child, blissfully spending summers in that lively little town, waking early to watch the

fishermen bring in their catch was a rare but sacred ritual. I would walk alone to the port,

entranced by the skin of the mariners, thinking that it looked as if it could endure anything. I

would close my eyes and breathe in through flared nostrils as much of the briny fish smell as I

could, proud of how much I loved it. I would think about my grandfather, fifty years earlier,

standing on that same pier, snatching a raw shrimp here, a sea urchin there, talking with the

marinai.

Even as a young child I was learning what it meant to let the sea dictate the menu, and to find joy

in what was offered.

Years later, the first time I dove for a sea urchin and cut it open on the beach, my mother laughed

and said, “You know you’re eating the story of your family right now.” That’s exactly what it felt

like.

Each season, each region, holds its own narrative, its own stories. Eating becomes an act of

belonging. It becomes an act of remembering, and of participating in the rhythms of time and

place.

——

I moved to Italy a year ago. Now I look forward to the edible markers of my time. The arrival of

strawberries in May feels like a gift.

Seasonal eating reminds us that wellness is not only about what we eat, but about how we align

ourselves with patience, rhythm, history, and place. It is about waiting, and in waiting, finding

joy.

Like hearing that favorite song on the radio, the sweetness lies in the moment when anticipation

meets arrival. Italy has taught me to listen for those moments and to taste them fully when they

finally come.

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About the author: Isola Chambers is a writer and editor based in Milan, working at the intersections of memory, culture, decolonization, and resistance.