I had my first real food awakening in the late 1990's. I lived for two years, in The Gambia, West Africa, where food is treated with a respect that I had never seen before; and some of this respect rubbed off on me. I grew to enjoy the anticipation of the late summer rice harvest, the heady smell of the melon and aubergine glut of June and the celebratory atmosphere of the Autumnal Warthog Barbecue!!  Through all of its exoticness, Africa helped me to re-discover seasonal eating and as I returned home to Ireland, I discovered enormous gaps in my growing food knowledge. My first real questions about food and seasonality in Ireland were prompted by a discussion about cauliflower. I realised I hadn't a clue when its season was. This was a bit embarrassing, if nothing else. I then realised that seasonal ignorance such as mine was common. Very few people could tell me what's in season when. It seemed that you needed to be either a farmer, a professional chef or over 60 years old to have the least idea of Ireland's food's seasonality.

For most of us, this isn't how it always was. We used to know our seasons. I remember as a child there were times that I knew were special and profound but I didn't have the words at the time to express what I felt. Rhubarb from our neighbour who had rhubarb plants or the sticky blackened hands we all had from picking blackberries, or enjoying tangy apple tarts in September made me associate certain foods with certain times of the year. The eating of them seemed unique and special, and now, with an adult view of the past, I know that they truly were. This association has been my ally in seasonal eating. My grandmother Bridget called herself a "picker". She would be full of joy as each wild or seasonal ingredient was ready to eat. Wild garlic in the spring, strawberries and raspberries in the summer, wild horseradish, perfectly ripe apples - nothing escaped her watchful eye. I believe we all need to become "pickers" again.

Over the centuries, we have developed many techniques to deal with the seasons. We have timed sowing and harvesting to ensure a year-round supply of fresh produce. We have learned to dry, salt, smoke, preserve and store food to keep us going through lean times, or to take advantage of seasonal abundance. During the past few hundred years, many people possessed the skills to keep their diet interesting, nutritious and delicious throughout the year. Today, technology has made many of this hard-earned knowledge unnecessary. Why go to the trouble of storing apples when they fly in from Tasmania ? Why learn about the best time to eat lamb when it's always available? Why indeed? By bringing us consistent, reliable abundance, the modern food industry has removed from us the burden of worrying and perhaps most importantly learning about our food supply. If you care about what food tastes like; if you care about the environment, who controls the food chain, or even just about how the countryside looks, then you will have experienced the fact that our modern victory over the seasons carries a heavy price.

Primarily, there's the issue of quality. challenging seasonality in a traditional way - for example, turning marrows into chutney- creates something new and interesting. Doing it the modern way - focusing on a few 'all-rounder' varieties, growing them under cover, picking them before they're ripe so they can withstand the journeys from glasshouse to warehouse to supermarket, then refrigerating them - just creates an inferior tasteless product. Food tastes better in season - compare real strawberries in season in Ireland with the large red lumps of Californian water that are for sale for the rest of the year. What's true for strawberries is also true for loads of other things: Winter root vegetables and brassicas that are improved by frost; hill lamb that has had a slow start grazing on spring pasture, fruit like plums, whose sugars have been developed to a perfection of ripeness by late-summer sunshine; wild game that has had a rich autumnal diet.

Then there's 'food miles', and the energy used in food production. Tonnes of aviation fuel are burnt in order to bring us green beans in December. Our fight with the seasons is accelerating climate change. In-season produce that hasn't travelled far is not just better for your taste buds; it's better for the planet, too. The supermarkets argue that this year-round predictability is what customers demand, just as we apparently will only buy straight bananas, or tomatoes whose redness are akin to a fire-engine. They may be right: but this is a demand for "cartoon food" that has been manufactured. Over the last couple of decades, shoppers have become steadily accustomed both to the permanent availability and to the physical super-model perfection of produce, as the supermarkets use these as marketing tools to gain advantage in their competitive world. In a world gone mad with special offers and loyalty points, nature still has an edge - seasonal food is cheaper. Crop permitting, almost anything that's in season will be plentiful and therefore cheaper. The current attempt to erase the seasons is part of a broader erosion of choice, in which ever-larger producers and retailers are slowly squeezing the life out of food diversity and local communities. The fact that this is presented to us as an expansion of choice is not without some Orwellian irony !! Many of us are now realising, a choice that may ultimately be between Dunnes Stores or Tesco is no choice at all, neither for farmers nor for shoppers.

Seasonal food challenges you to think about what you eat and it makes you think about preserving stuff. Faced with a massive glut of fruit and vegetables, what do you do? - throw it away? - not likely. Jams, chutneys, jellies, pickles preserves, even for those fortunate enough to keep their own, pigs - bacon. All of these were invented as ways of preserving a seasonal surplus. And all of them create new foods, whose origins are in the seasons, but which can keep reminding you all year round of the fleeting seasonal treat from which they originated. I recently salted a ham from one of our pigs and I am greedy and giddy with anticipation for the day (some time in early June) when I can take it down from its hanging place and slice it thinly and enjoy it with in-season tomatoes. I am sure this home-produced air-dried ham will taste of the apples, leeks and herbs that this pig enjoyed last year. It will in fact, I am convinced, taste autumnal. Who wants to eat the same things all year round? I now enjoy having to wait for stuff. The anticipation of the first gooseberry from Wexford; looking forward to summer broad beans and the pumpkins of autumn. A year is just long enough to forget how good it was last time, so that's twelve months of food surprises.

But how can we eat seasonally when we are surrounded by the four seasons all year round? The first step is simply to be aware of the seasons and food. The second is to consider different places to go looking for food, something which more and more people are starting to do. It is worth seeking out your local farmers' market if there is one: there are more and more throughout the country. The website www.irelandmarkets.com has an excellent listing for the whole country. Then there are vegetable box schemes, also on the increase, and which mostly pride themselves on delivering seasonal, local, and usually organic produce.

Finally there's the grow-it-yourself options. Ultra-serious gardening gourmets like Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall claim that growing your own is the only way to experience the true freshness of seasonal produce that deteriorates really quickly, like beans and peas: he even suggests having a pan on the boil before you pick your own broad-beans !! Given the superb quality of some of the farmers' market broad-beans I've eaten last season, this seems a little excessive. But there's little to match the quality and the thrill of picking your own courgettes on a hot summer's day, or wandering out on a dark winter's evening to pick some fresh leeks for a warming soup. Even the smallest garden can produce quality and variety. I think of these actions - shopping differently, growing something - as little pockets of resistance.

When I started to think about food's seasonality some time ago, it never occurred to me that buying an in-season raspberry direct from the grower could be a political act. But it is because you are effectively voting for change. Thousands of little transactions like these, happening more and more often, are part of what's needed to give us back a sustainable food chain that benefits everyone. Eating seasonally brings a constantly changing menu of food at its peak. Intense, earthy, nostalgic tastes are waiting to be rediscovered. The first sharp gooseberry of summer; the rich tastes of autumn with wild mushrooms, game, apples and pears; then the comforting root vegetables of winter, which food-writer Nigel Slater has described as the "food equivalent of a big sloppy hug" - who could say no to that?. Far from seeking to conquer the seasons, we should seek to embrace the seasons as a matter of urgency and gastronomy.