Sweet like a slice of Pumpkin Pie

**On All Hallows’ Even, I’d like to raise the question: “Where do all the pumpkins go?!” These orbs of golden succulence are only in shops for a few days, but as soon as the clock strikes midnight and the first of November hits – they’re gone.**

To most, pumpkins are merely a fruit to which you risk losing fingers when attempting to carve them into gruesome faces. Their fluorescent insides often end up at the bottom of a refuse sack with no second thought, or thrown out of Rootes windows at innocent victims. I have even heard of them being left in flatmates’ beds for them to cuddle up next to after a night out. Undoubtedly, all these options are ludicrous. The tasty and above all wallet-friendly possibilities with these stringy, seed-saturated innards are endless.

Last Halloween I made a huge batch of pumpkin soup and a pumpkin pie. My boyfriend at the time said that he hated the fruit (despite having never eaten one) and would not eat the meal I had lovingly prepared, for fear of, and I quote, “food poisoning”. Needless to say he did not suffer a pumpkin- related death and in a typically male fashion, wolfed down his portion of the pumpkin pie before proceeding to eat mine. I vowed to buy another to expand my-pumpkin related repertoire.

{{quote The narrow minded mentality we have towards our produce undoubtedly causes such a large scale of waste }}

Gone. Evaporated. Totally disappeared. Despite the absence of Cinderella’s carriage in the carpark, there were no pumpkins left in store. The shelf stacker said they had got rid of them this morning. When asked “where do all the pumpkins go?” he just shrugged his shoulders and continued stacking leeks carelessly onto the shelves. We had to settle for the inherently inferior butternut squash.

Tesco sends 131,000 tonnes of produce to landfill each year, and Sainsburys trails at 91,000 tonnes. I am not suggesting that a significant amount of the waste comes from lonely, un-purchased, pumpkins on 1 November; but the narrow minded mentality we have towards our produce undoubtedly causes such a large scale of waste.

In this economic climate we should put supermarkets under pressure to address what they cast aside as ‘useless’.

Now I know I am sounding a little bit crazy – deranged even – but I will hold my hands up now and proudly say that I am a pumpkin lover.