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Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 79: What's Your Favorite Seasonal Snack?

Posted by Ed Levine, August 7, 2009 at 8:45 AM

"I have been feasting with impunity on fruits that are being grown responsibly 3,000 miles from my home."

When you're a serious eater and a serious dieter you look for treats or snacks that you can eat with impunity at different times of the year. Yes, all you Michael Pollan and Alice Waters acolytes, I am talking about seasonal snacks that I can eat without worrying about my weight. Bananas have become a staple of my serious diet, but they are neither local nor seasonal unless you happen to live in a sub-tropical area. (I did have some killer baby bananas in Vieques, Puerto Rico, last December that tasted like they had been crossed with limes--banimas or limnanas, anyone?)

Summer in New York offers serious dieters many, many low-calorie snacking pleasures. I would like to say they're all grown within 250 miles of my home, but that would be a lie.

Blueberries are local or certainly regional, and especially cheap and plentiful right now. At Greenmarkets in and around Gotham you might pay $4 a pint. At the local street fruit stands right now I can sometimes find local blueberries grown by larger agribusiness concerns for $2.50 a pint. I snack on them like nuts throughout the day at the office.

Local strawberries are also plentiful and fairly reasonably priced right now in my neck of the woods, but I never know what to do with the stems and I always wind up with strawberry juice on my clothes. The day-neutral tri-star strawberries are especially sweet and juicy and well worth the premium you have to pay for them.

But in recent weeks I have been feasting with impunity on fruits that are being grown responsibly 3,000 miles from my home.

Yes, locavores might cringe at the notion that the best piece of fruit I have snacked on this summer is a garden-variety pluot from California. What is a pluot? A plum that's been genetically crossed with an apricot. Genius idea, isn't it?

Take a look at one of these bad boys. Sweet and gently acidic, these ungodly juicy babies are truly a dieter's best friend. That's what I hope, anyway, with the weigh-in coming up any moment now.

The Weigh-In

213. Up two pounds from last week. I'm not terribly concerned, since I dropped four pounds last week. I think I'll be all right, as long as there are pluots to be eaten.

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