Who wants to hear a scary Halloween story? According to Hubbub 39.9 million pumpkins are bought in UK at Halloween, and 22.2 million of these, worth £32.6 million, end up thrown away uneaten. Apparently an astonishing 41% of the population don’t even know that they’re edible, although that’s at least a slight improvement on 2014’s figure of 58%.
So what can we do instead? You could always skip the pumpkin altogether, Last year I stuck the sign below to my door instead of putting out a pumpkin to let passing trick or treaters know that sweets and ham acting were on offer within from an increasingly drunk and giggly witch in a secondhand hat off ebay and her Mum’s black dress, and I intend to reuse both the sign and the costume this year. But I realise that probably won’t cut it for people with children, and while perhaps this is just showing my own prejudices about which forms of consumption are justified and which aren’t, I do feel that activities involving creativity and a mindful connection to the cycle of the seasons and the fruits of the Earth are probably the sort of thing we should be encouraging if we want a better future.
So if you do decide to go with a real pumpkin this Halloween I would encourage you to scoop out as much of the flesh as possible before you start carving your design – I know it’s murder on the wrists, but the thinner you get it the easier it will be to carve and the longer it will last outdoors without going mouldy. The best tool I’ve found for scooping out pumpkins is a curved spoon carving knife, but I realise they’re probably not quite as easily available in the average household. And then eat your excavations! My go-to recipe (which works very well in the Haybox) is squash soup: fry a large white onion and garlic to taste up with some tikka curry paste, add a can of coconut milk, a stock cube and your squash scrapings and simmer. More sustainable squash recipes are available here.
Unfortunately it does have to be said that the traditional Halloween giant pumpkin doesn’t taste of very much, and it’s flesh adds bulk to dishes but very little in the way of flavour. Spices help, but it might be worth considering edibility from the outset and choosing another, tastier variety of squash. There’s certainly plenty of choice out there of varieties, tastes and textures.
It’s currently thought that the first squash was domesticated ten thousand years ago, and at least six subsequent species seem to have been domesticated independently by the indigenous peoples of South and Central and then selected and hybridised into the vast diversity of forms that we know today. The word “squash” is an anglicisation of askutasquash, a Narrangansett word meaning “a green thing eaten raw” recorded by the coloniser of what is today known as Rhode Island. Squashes continue to form a staple of Indigenous American agriculture and cuisine in both North and South America to this day, with heroic efforts underway to revive ancestral varieties and restore seed sovereignty.
A map of north, central and south America with spots showing the distribution of wild species of Cucurbita. The densest collect of spots is over the southern USA and throughout central America, with less dense spots running down what lookes to be the Andes and then accross the contiet to the mouth of the Paraná river.
Circled on top of the map are likely points of origin for six domesticated squash species.
Cucurbita pepo ovifera var. ovifera is roughly centred on Arkansas
Cucurbita pepo ssp. pepo is roughly centred on Mexico City
Cucurbita argyrosperma ssp. argyrosperma is roughly centred on Guadalajara
Cucurbita moschata is centred on Colombia
Cucurbita ficifolia is centred on Lake Poopó
Cucurbita maxima ssp. maxima is centred on Northern Argentina
Incidentally it’s speculated that squash evolved to be eaten and have their seeds dispersed by mastodons, and when they went extinct in the Americas domestication was all that prevented the squash from following them. Wild squashes contained bitter compounds called cucurbitacins that can be toxic in high concentrations, but mastodons were probably resistant to them due to their large size. Humans progressively bred these compounds out of edible squashes over the years, but the pathways to make them can be unexpectedly reactivated when squashes hybridise and upregulated when plants are stressed. The scorching summers of the last few years have stressed a lot of squash plants (as well as people) leading to periodic media scares about “toxic squash syndrome“, but it’s easy to avoid poisoning yourself by not eating courgettes or squashes if they taste bitter. (Toxic squash syndrome cannot, by the way, make courgettes explosive.)
If a tastier squash is proving hard to track down in the UK you could of course go old school and choose a different vegetable. It’s thought that the custom of carving vegetables into the shape of faces originated in Ireland, although Gaelic Scotland is sometimes also claimed as the origin of the tradition. The original vegetables used would have been turnips or swedes, which as the following videos show are both harder to carve and produce a frankly more horrifying result so it’s no wonder that when people of these cultures emigrated to the US they swiftly replaced them with pumpkins.
These suggestions are inevitably followed by a further crop of posts from wildlife trusts, local parks and botanic gardens and the Woodland Trust asking people to please not do this. These suggestions are well intentioned, but if you stop to think for a second there are no other circumstances in which anyone would suggest dumping a load of rotting vegetable matter in your local park was a good idea – the main wildlife it’s likely to attract is rats. Furthermore pumpkins apparently give hedgehogs diarrhea, and this is the time of year when they’re trying to gain weight for hibernation. As any number of ghastly “influencers” peddling laxative-laced slimming teas will tell you, diarrhea is the opposite of what you need for weight gain.
The best thing you can do with your sad post-Halloween squash is to compost it, either at home or through your local food waste collection if you’re lucky to have one. Hopefully you will have cooked enough of the insides to only leave a thin shell, but speaking as someone who runs a community composting scheme a please if you haven’t: please, please chop it up into small pieces before composting it. Compost magic happens in the presence of microbes and oxygen, and both of these can only reach the surface of the pieces in the composter. So the larger the pieces the greater the chance the inside will fester instead of breaking down into nice rich aerated compost and just turn into horrible chunks of oozy mess. Chunks of squash and for some reason whole potatoes are the bane of my life when making compost from collected food waste.
However you choose to celebrate this spooky season, I wish you a happy Halloween and urge you to follow Maxi’s example here and keep sustainable squash on your mind.
Tangled Bank Foraging and Fibre Crafts 