Frozen vegetables are either commercially packaged or frozen at home. A wide range of frozen vegetables are sold in supermarkets, sometimes packaged in either rectangular boxes or plastic bags.
Examples of frozen vegetables which can be found in supermarkets include spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, peas, corn, yam (in Asia) either packaged as a single ingredient or as mixtures. There are occasions when frozen vegetables are mixed with other food types, such as pasta or cheese.
Some popular brands include Birds Eye and Green Giant as well as supermarkets 'own brand' items.
Frozen vegetables have some advantages over fresh ones, in that they are available when the fresh counterpart is out-of-season, they have a very long shelf life when kept in a freezer and that they often have been processed a step or more closer to eating. In many cases, they may be more economical to purchase than their fresh counterparts.
While many consider frozen vegetables to be inferior to their fresh counterparts, the opposite is true in many cases. Vegetables purchased in the produce section of supermarkets have spent multiple days in transit, and many of the original nutrients may have been lost. It is suggested by the retailers and manufacturers that frozen vegetables are frozen at their freshest, maintaining their nutrients. Freezing does change the taste and texture of the vegetables, however, making them less savoury to some consumers.
Read more about Frozen Vegetables: Health Benefits and Risks
Famous quotes containing the words frozen and/or vegetables:
“We all have bad days, of course, a secret that only makes us feel more guilty. But once my friends and I started telling the truth about how far we deviated from perfection, we couldn’t stop. . . . One mother admitted leaving the grocery store without her kids—”I just forgot them. The manager found them in the frozen foods aisle, eating Eskimo Pies.””
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Without any extraordinary effort of genius, I have discovered that nature was the same three thousand years ago as at present; that men were but men then as well as now; that modes and customs vary often, but that human nature is always the same. And I can no more suppose, that men were better, braver, or wiser, fifteen hundred or three thousand years ago, than I can suppose that the animals or vegetables were better than they are now.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)