September Harvest

From around the middle of September, morning and evening temperatures will begin to fall – the drier, cooler and more comfortable weather of autumn sets in.

In Japanese, the favorite phrase for autumn is “minori no aki,” which means the season of harvest. This is the season where you see tables with wide variety of delicious things to eat, rice matures and is harvested, fruit ripens and fish taste at their best.

Good health depends on the daily meal we take. Can you substitute a fruit for a vegetable? Well, fruits are good since they are rich in vitamin C. It is really nice that most fruits can also be eaten raw, which means no cooking loss at all. In addition, many dietary fibers and water soluble pectin in fruits and vegetables are present. Soluble fiber and insoluble fiber have so many benefits to dietary.

Eating fresh fruits and vegetables are one of the simplest choices you can make to improve your overall health. A vegetable and fruit rich diet can help protect you from arthritis, heart disease, stroke, dementia, cancer and can even help slow down your body’s aging process.

The month of September is the season of harvest that yields the rich variety of nature’s abundance, it is a season of hearty appetites. Therefore, we look at foods that people enjoy during this season. The following are those that Japanese traditionally associate most closely with autumn.

Rice

Rice is the staple of the Japanese diet. Between September and October, rice ripens, and soon the freshly harvested grain is available on the market as shinmai. When cooked, new rice is soft and glistening as well as faintly sweet, and people look forward to its appearance on the market each autumn.

Mushrooms

Filled with nutrients drawn from the forest floor, mushrooms are rich in flavor and aroma. They are among the foods that people are looking forward to eat during autumn. Among them, the matsutake mushroom is king. Matsutake mushrooms are gathered in groves of akamatsu or red pine in Japan and they are considered the finest in flavor and fragrance and command such a high price that most people can only afford to eat them once a year.

Vegetables

Absorbing the nutrients of the earth throughout the summer, vegetables, sweet potato, taro potatoes, carrots also arrive at harvest time in autumn. One of the regular excursions of the kindergarten, day care center and elementary school year is the satsuma-imo dig when the children go themselves to dig up sweet potatoes grown in nearby fields.

Fish

The variety of fish most closely associated with autumn is sanma (saury). This long, slender fish is shaped like a short sword. Sanma is usually eaten salt-grilled and eaten with grated daikon and shoyu as condiments.

Fruits

Autumn is the season of plentiful harvest of fruit: grapes, nashi pears, chestnuts, persimmons and more. The sight of these colorful fruits at the grocer’s display and their sweet fragrances is irresistible. Persimmon trees grow in many people’s gardens where the fruit turns bright orange in the fall, making persimmons one of the most familiar of fruits to Japanese.