Off The Shelf #24: Squashing The Fun
Covering pumpkins this week, before everyone else does.
I hope everyone is doing well as the darker nights draw in. We’ve had an entire summer go by since I launched Off The Shelf in the spring, and I’ve learned a lot. But I really want to hear from you guys on what you’ve found most interesting. I’ve dropped a few poll questions in at the end and would be grateful for feedback. Feel free to add any comments too. And as always, if you like it, get a mate to subscribe!
I’m biased. I hate Halloween. I might still be traumatised by the ghoulish assault on our porch with silly string one year when I was a child, or I might just have the ‘it’s a American commercial import’ reaction hard-wired into me. But the whole thing just winds me up.
Anyway - now I’ve lost a few readers, I thought I’d get into the spirit of it and do a seasonal piece. And what better food to cover for Halloween than pumpkins?
SQUASHES ARE SUSTAINABLE
It’s hard to get an exact handle on the environmental footprint of winter squashes (of which pumpkins are one). My favourite source for this is this report on Our World In Data, but it doesn’t get that specific. So we have to generalise. Surprisingly to me, pumpkins and other winter squashes are actually fruits (not vegetables). Greenhouse gas emissions for ‘other fruit’ are around 1% of those from beef production (the most environmentally impactful food). In terms of land use, its 0.3% of the land required for beef, and 11% of the water. While there’s likely to be some variation in these numbers for squashes (this report suggest emissions could be even lower than the averages above), it’s a fair bet to say that winter squashes in themselves are pretty harmless.
BUT WE WASTE TOO MUCH
The real problem when it comes to pumpkins - other than how difficult they are to cut and carve - is how many go to waste. According to the Hubbub foundation, a sustainability advocate, we buy almost 40 million pumpkins per year, and throw away more than 22 million. Only one in nine people polled in the UK say that they ‘always cook’ their pumpkin. This doesn’t surprise me.
Recently, I saw a social media post from a connection of mine at a pick-your-own-pumpkin patch. Lots of fun being had by small children picking pumpkins and posing for photos. A sea of orange, with smiles and laughter all round. It seems like these places are turning into real commercial enterprises, and are part of a growing trend. I put ‘pumpkin patch’ into Google Trends to check out the search activity around this, and there was a clear step-up in interest in pumpkin picking in 2020. This is probably because it was an outdoor, covid-safe activity, and a good option for bored children. But the searches stuck around in 2021, and the seasonal uptick is underway again this year, so it looks like this activity could be set to stay.
Among other mad things, some of these places offer… pumpkin firing. Yes, you read that right: shooting pumpkins from a cannon. There’s obviously a massive risk here that as pumpkin patches become more like theme parks, there’s going to be no let-up in food waste.
Why is this such a problem? Because 1) it means that all the effort and energy that’s gone into growing this stuff has been squandered; and 2) when food goes into landfill, it emits methane, which is way worse than carbon dioxide and contributes to global warming. I covered this general problem in more detail here.
SO JUST COOK IT!
One of the things I like about working for an American company is that I have a number of American colleagues, and when Autumn (or ‘Fall’) rolls around - especially around Thanksgiving - they bring treats into the office. And it turns out, pumpkin pie is actually quite nice. And here in Britain, we love the idea of a soup or stew as the dark nights draw in, and butternut squash is always an appealing vegetarian option on menus in trendy cafes and restaurants. So why can’t we be more like Uncle Sam and start treating pumpkins as food?
There are plenty of ways to use a pumpkin:
🍲 Chop it up, roast it with onions and garlic, along with some spices, add some stock, and blitz it into a soup
🫘 Take the seeds, toss with with olive oil, salt and pepper, roast them in the oven and have them as a tasty snack
🍛 Turn it into chunks, sautee with peppers, onions and garlic, add some chickpeas, cumin and chilli, throw in some coconut milk and spinach, simmer, and you’ve got yourself a curry
Make a pumpkin-spiced latte. I’ve got no idea how to do this, and no interest in finding out, but you can google it.
So how would I summarise this? Well, remember I hate Halloween. So ideally, let’s all just stop mucking about with pumpkins and let them be. Let the farmers grow something else. But I realise that’s a bit on the Scrooge side. So if we have to bring these messy and unwieldy vegetables fruits into our lives once a year, can we at least do something useful with them so they don’t go to waste?
Data as of 16 October 2022. Just to keep my senior politician readership out of hot water on Sunday morning TV. Price of milk represented by the average price of comparable 2-pint bottles at 5 major retailers in the United Kingdom (Tesco, Aldi, Sainsbury’s Waitrose and Marks & Spencer). Index is equally weighted and based on online prices. Methodology is purely proprietary and utterly unscientific. For actual price data that might be remotely useful for economic analysis, try the Office for National Statistics.
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