Seasonal Eating in Early Years: Why It Matters and How to Implement It
Seasonal eating means choosing foods that are naturally harvested at specific times of year in your local area. This might seem like a niche concern in an era where supermarkets stock strawberries year-round and asparagus appears in December but for early years settings, embracing seasonal food provision offers compelling benefits: reduced costs, enhanced nutrition, environmental education opportunities, and connections to the natural world that enrich children’s learning.
The Case for Seasonal Eating
From a nutritional standpoint, seasonal produce offers advantages. Fruits and vegetables consumed during their natural growing season are typically fresher, having travelled shorter distances and spent less time in storage. This often means higher nutrient content, as vitamins and minerals degrade over time and through transportation.
Seasonal food tastes better. A tomato ripened naturally in summer sunshine tastes dramatically different from one grown in a heated greenhouse in winter. When food tastes better, children are more likely to eat it, which is a significant consideration when encouraging fruit and vegetable consumption.
Cost represents another major advantage. In-season produce is generally more affordable because supply is abundant and transportation costs are lower. For settings managing tight budgets, seasonal menu planning can stretch resources further without compromising nutritional quality.
Environmental benefits matter too. Seasonal, local food typically requires less energy for production, storage, and transport, reducing your carbon footprint. Teaching young children about sustainability starts with concrete experiences like eating strawberries in summer rather than winter.
Perhaps most importantly, seasonal eating creates educational opportunities. It connects children to natural cycles, helps them understand where food comes from, and provides tangible experiences of how the world works. These connections support the EYFS understanding the world objective and help develop environmental awareness.
Understanding UK Seasonal Patterns
The UK has distinct seasonal food availability, though modern agriculture extends some seasons through polytunnels and storage. Understanding these patterns helps with menu planning.
Spring brings asparagus, new potatoes, spring onions, radishes, watercress, rhubarb, and early salad leaves. It’s a transitional season when stored winter vegetables meet the first fresh spring growth.
Summer offers abundance from strawberries, raspberries, cherries, broad beans, peas, courgettes, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, and potatoes. This is when many children’s favourite fruits appear.
Autumn provides apples, pears, plums, blackberries, squashes, pumpkins, sweetcorn, runner beans, and beetroot. Root vegetables begin appearing, which typically store well giving us good variety for the winter.
Winter relies more on stored crops and hardy vegetables from potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, swedes, leeks, cabbage, kale, and stored apples and pears. While fresh produce is more limited, these vegetables are nutritious and versatile.
Practical Menu Planning for Seasonal Eating
Implementing seasonal eating doesn’t mean completely reinventing your menu every few weeks. It’s about emphasising different ingredients at different times while maintaining familiar, popular dishes.
Start by identifying key seasonal ingredients each month and building them into your existing menu structure. If you serve vegetable pasta bakes weekly consider varying which vegetables you feature so using courgettes and tomatoes in summer, butternut squash and leeks in winter, asparagus and peas in spring.
Create a rotating seasonal menu cycle. Rather than a fixed menu that repeats identically, develop spring, summer, autumn, and winter variations. The structure might remain consistent, for example vegetable soup on Mondays, a pasta dish on Wednesday but ingredients shift seasonally.
Partner with local suppliers when possible. Greengrocers, farm shops, or farmers’ markets often stock seasonal, local produce. Building relationships with these suppliers can improve quality and potentially reduce costs while supporting local food systems. It’s also worth speaking to your local supermarkets to see whether you can get any unsold produce at reduced rates before it is thrown out.
Frozen vegetables are your allies in seasonal eating. Peas, sweetcorn, broad beans, and berries are frozen at peak ripeness, preserving nutrients and offering year-round access to seasonal foods at reasonable prices.
Educating Children About Seasonality
Make seasonality visible and understandable to children. Create seasonal food displays showing which fruits and vegetables are currently in season. Update these monthly, involving children in observing what appears and disappears.
Use visual seasonal calendars showing when different foods grow. These can be as simple as poster-style calendars with pictures of foods arranged by season, or interactive displays where children move food pictures to the current season.
Read books about seasonal food and farming to help children understand growing cycles and seasonal availability.
Discuss seasonality during meals. “These strawberries are so sweet because they grew here in England during our sunny summer” or “We’re eating lots of root vegetables right now because they grow underground and stay fresh through winter” provides context that builds understanding.
Growing Food with Children
Nothing teaches seasonality better than growing food. Even small-scale growing projects help children understand that food doesn’t simply appear in shops, it grows, takes time, requires care, and is available at specific times.
Start simple: cress on wet cotton wool, beans in transparent jars, herbs in window boxes, or tomatoes in pots. Children can observe daily changes, care for plants, and eventually harvest and eat what they’ve grown.
If you have outdoor space, create a vegetable garden or raised beds. Children can plant seeds in spring, tend plants through summer, and harvest in autumn allowing them to directly experience seasonal cycles. Even without lots of outdoor space you can still use the space you have creatively from sunny windowsills, window boxes or even a pot outside your setting door.
If you’re able to try to visit farms, allotments, or pick-your-own farms seasonally. Picking strawberries in summer or pumpkins in autumn creates memorable connections between food and growing seasons.
Seasonal Recipes for Early Years Settings
Some recipes naturally lend themselves to seasonal variation, making them ideal for settings embracing seasonal eating.Seasonal vegetable soups work year-round with changing ingredients: spring vegetable soup with peas, summer tomato and basil soup, autumn butternut squash soup, winter root vegetable soup.
Fruit-based desserts adapt perfectly to seasons: summer berry fruit salad, autumn baked apples or pears to winter stewed fruits (which also freeze well and work well on their own or stirred into unsweetened yoghurts or porridges). Seasonal fruit is often cheaper and tastier, making these desserts both economical and appealing.
Seasonal vegetables as sides or incorporated into familiar dishes help children accept them. Summer salads with cucumber and tomatoes, autumn roasted root vegetables, winter braised cabbage, spring steamed asparagus, all provide variety while maintaining child-friendly preparation methods.
Addressing Challenges
Some foods which children love aren’t available year-round in the UK. Bananas, for instance, don’t grow here but are nutritious and popular. Seasonal eating doesn’t mean never serving imported foods, it means emphasising local, seasonal options when available.
Some seasons, particularly winter, offer less variety in fresh produce. This is where frozen vegetables, stored fruits like apples, and versatile root vegetables become essential. Winter eating requires creativity but can be nutritious and appealing.
Picky eaters might resist unfamiliar seasonal vegetables. Introduce these gradually alongside familiar foods, prepare them in child-friendly ways, and remember that repeated exposure (10-15 times) is often necessary before acceptance.
Cost Management Through Seasonal Planning
Seasonal eating can significantly reduce food costs when planned strategically. In-season produce is typically 30-50% cheaper than the same items out of season. A punnet of British strawberries in July costs considerably less than imported ones in January.
Buy in bulk when prices are lowest and preserve if possible. When British apples are abundant and cheap in autumn, buy larger quantities. Many can be stored for weeks in cool conditions.
Build relationships with suppliers who can alert you to seasonal gluts. When local growers have excess courgettes or tomatoes, prices drop dramatically. Being flexible enough to increase these ingredients when abundant saves money.
Plan menus after checking current prices and availability rather than deciding menus months in advance. This flexibility allows you to take advantage of seasonal bargains.
Celebrating British Food Culture
Seasonal eating naturally celebrates British food culture and traditions. Many traditional British dishes evolved around seasonal availability from spring lamb to winter root vegetable stews.
Introducing children to these traditional dishes connects them to cultural heritage while teaching about seasonality. A child eating rhubarb compote in spring or roasted parsnips in winter experiences British food culture and seasonal patterns simultaneously.
This connection to place and tradition gives children roots and understanding of food heritage, which is important in a globalised food system where many children are disconnected from where and how food is produced.
Digital tools like Lunchbox Lab (subscriptions starting at £19.99/month/ setting) can help settings plan seasonal menus efficiently, rotate recipes based on ingredient availability, and get seasonal menu inspiration (and sharing) through the recipe marketplace. Use the code connect10 to benefit from 10% off an annual premium plus subscription with Lunchbox Lab or feel free to message holly@lunchboxlab.co.uk if you’d like to arrange a demo or find out more!
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About the Author
Holly Richards is the founder of Lunchbox Lab, an app empowering nurseries and schools to create tasty meals complying with the EYFS Nutrition Guidelines and School Food Standards. She is currently studying for a Masters in Applied Nutrition at City University, is a board director for Whole School Meals and a mum of three young children.