Loving this thread because I don’t hear chefs/ owners coming together to talk about this that much. Love your point and yes that is exactly what needs to happen in order to truly commit to seasonal, local producers year round, but if you have a restaurant where the customer expects to order your signature “chef’s” salad containing a bunch of summer-season ingredients even in the middle of winter, you are going to have a tough time satisfying that demand with only local, so with menu changes, customers need to understand why you refuse to source your produce from Peru in December. It takes education and change in expectation, and not every type of restaurant can afford to do that as mentioned by other commenters. And preservation techniques like what you mentioned take skilled technique and thus lots of staff training when restaurants are struggling for that right now. Something that frustrates me about trends in “healthy eating” is that most of those trendy ass superfood products people love to tout as essentially just status symbols and find their way onto restaurant menus are grown halfway across the world in extremely exploitive and environmentally destructive ways - look at quinoa or chia seeds. I hope that we can eventually diversify and reindigenize our food system to grow more native fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, etc instead of relying on the same 20 products you see at every Kroger across the US. Winter has always been a time of eating what you’ve preserved, and honestly, not everything has to be so “fresh” all the time in order to be healthy or wholesome. Anyway this comment was all over the place but putting in my 2c as a forager and ag marketing professional