Has there ever been a vegetable so mistreated? So maligned and objectified? So mocked and then discarded? Why do we abuse pumpkins when they never did us any harm?
The day after Halloween, porches all over America are littered with jack-o-lanterns in various stages of disfigurement, carved into toothy demonic caricatures or goofy grins, charred on the inside from burned out candles or, worse yet, smashed to bits.
Many people may not know this, but pumpkins are not just for decoration and target practice, but they’re actually food. It’s true. Pumpkins are a good source of vitamins A, C and E as well as folate and are allegedly good for eyesight. Anybody who has ever tried making pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin, instead of from a can knows how authentic and, uh, well, totally gross and slow it is.
Pumpkins are just weird. They’re big and orange, made of mostly seeds and stringy, smelly goo. And air. Pumpkins are the embodiment of disappointment, Nature’s way of calling us suckers and losers. They promise a big ball of food and when we open them up there is only emptiness.
And pumpkins are like human heads. Or more like cartoon heads, inviting artistic satire and make-believe fear. In Washington Irving’s short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane is chased by the headless horseman, carrying a pumpkin for a head. Ichabod disappears, leaving behind only fragments of pumpkin.
Like the headless horseman, we can’t seem to resist smashing pumpkins. This used to be considered an act of vandalism. But now, it’s praised as environmentally friendly. Since 2014, Pumpkin Smash and its affiliates have composted over 1,253 tons of pumpkins in over 95 sites across the country, including Colony Acres in North Liberty. In early November, guests are invited to Colony to squash, smash, bust up and otherwise pulverize pumpkins, letting the orange slime fly where it may (hopefully, missing any innocent bystanders). The goal is to use the valuable nutrients as fertilizer and keep decomposing pumpkins out of landfills.
Pumpkin Smash reports that their composting efforts have kept 926.9 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere as well as 269,114 gallons of water out of landfills (pumpkins are 90 percent water.)
Every year, newspapers run charming photos of zoo animals chomping leftover pumpkins. Not bothering with formalities, elephants and hippos are shown powerfully crunching pumpkins whole in lurid closeups as we imagine human heads being ground to a pulp (well, okay, most people probably don’t imagine that).
YouTube has videos showing pumpkins thrown out of an airplane from 300 feet, turning to liquid as they hit the ground. In some videos, pumpkins are blown up with dynamite in slow motion or blasted with high powered rifles, hacked to pieces by samurai swords, chopped with axes or shattered with Louisville slugger baseball bats. From the looks of it, you’d think humans are engaged in mortal combat with pumpkins.
At least in America pumpkins are created to be victims, carved into horrible or silly faces, lit from the inside to make them even more gruesome-looking and then violently squished. This Thanksgiving, you might take a moment to appreciate the pumpkins that went into your pumpkin pie. Those were the lucky ones.