“Fresh” is an over-used food word these days. It sounds healthful, green and virtuous. It might even seem a little hard to come by on a Maine island this time of year.

Restaurant menus say things like “we use only the finest, freshest ingredients,” as if everyone else, or even they themselves on a bad day, might use whatever they could lay their hands on. No one would ever say “we use the cheapest canned and frozen grub we can find whenever we can get away with it,” even if lots of them do. There is a whole industry dedicated to producing dishes for restaurants that look fresh, but are as pre-prepared as anything out of the grocery chain freezer cases. And have you noticed the fish section of the store? “Previously frozen” is the phrase. Not thawed which sounds a little limp. When I see that, I always think of “pre-owned” cars, not, mind you, “used” which has a kind of worn-out sound. It just seems silly and nobody I know is really fooled.

There is also a relatively new movement among some towards eating only raw food. This extraordinarily challenging regimen even has it own uncookbooks, and in larger cities there are restaurants where you can choose a dish from an array of assembled raw ingredients.

Now I don’t have a problem with fresh or raw food. I admire restaurants that grow their own vegetables and herbs, though I might be a little nonplussed to see them leading a steer into the kitchen. And I don’t admire the vegetables you see in some produce cases that look like road kill, and wouldn’t count them fresh just because they are raw. The really funny thing about this new interest in really fresh food is that humankind has been knocking itself out for several thousands of years trying to figure out how to have an even supply of food through all the vagaries of weather and seasonal change, and we came up with some pretty good ways to keep food well and delicious in a preserved state, and then we put a lot of it at risk by pushing it a little too far.

The old-timers used to call fresh anything that wasn’t salted. In fact, you “freshened” something by soaking it in water to get the salt out. Fresh green beans were ones you just picked out of the garden. If you salted them, which you can do, you wouldn’t necessarily consider them fresh just because you soaked the salt out, anymore than you might consider frozen green beans as fresh. But if something was picked a week or two ago thousands of miles away, would you call it fresh by the time it got to Maine? Somewhere I read that vegetables whisked from the field to the freezing plant arrive on our plates with more nutrients intact, than “fresh” broccoli shipped in March from some place in South America.

I think the confusion and obsession about fresh arises from our having survived the Can Every Vegetable Era which spanned the late 1800s through the middle-1900s during which the gardening season became a kind of endurance contest in which housewives engaged in the extreme sport of cramming every vegetable they could find into a mason jar. It must have seemed scientific and modern and it was widely promoted by the Extension Services and the Home Economics movement, especially during the World Wars. It is satisfying — I love looking at my jars of canned tomatoes. It is handy, too, because all you have to do is open the jar and warm them up to eat them. That era was followed quickly by the Freeze Your Vegetables Period for those who could afford freezers.

But not all vegetables have to be canned or frozen. I have always felt canned carrots and potatoes, or frozen turnip and winter squash seemed a bit redundant. I have fresh vegetables in my cellar this minute: carrots, beets, potatoes, turnips and cabbages. Not that long ago, we even had apples, but we ate them. In a cool dry room, I have winter squashes. Until that cabbage wends its way into a boiled dinner or coleslaw, I am going to count it fresh. I have shell beans, corn and green beans in the freezer. That part of supper is previously fresh.

Here is a recipe for something fresh and raw. In fact, it is so fresh that a young friend of ours, on munching her way through a forkful, sighed and said, “This coleslaw makes me think of summer.”

Coleslaw:

3 cups of shredded cabbage (or one-half a small head)

1 cup of grated carrots (or round it up or down to the nearest carrot)

1 small onion or a quarter of a large red onion

3 tablespoons of vinaigrette (The Newman’s Own Balsamic is pretty good)

Salt and pepper

Toss together.

Is that all? Yep.

Sandy Oliver cooks and writes on Islesboro.