BodyText2
So how, exactly, did a humble, prosaic fruit (yes, it is a fruit) become a rib-skinned rock star? For answers, UDaily turned to Cindy Ott, associate professor of history and material culture at the University of Delaware and author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon. She has the skinny surrounding the autumnal symbol you love to love… or, in some cases, love to hate.
Consider it pulp-nonfiction.
1. Pumpkin makes you feel warm and fuzzy for the past. Because a single seed produces quite a bit, and because pumpkin can be preserved for quite some time, Indigenous Americans once considered the fruit key to their survival. When colonists turned up, they jumped on this pumpkin train for the same reason — but not happily. What these new arrivals really desired were the vegetables they had enjoyed back home in Europe, like turnips and cabbage and onions. As soon as they could, they planted and harvested more familiar produce, and pumpkin became a “food of last resort,” Ott said.
By the 19th century, the rejected gourd had close to zero market value — some farmers grew them only as cheap feed for livestock. But then, an unexpected thing happened. As Americans migrated to urban areas in droves, a sense of nostalgia for the simple farm life of yore settled in.
“They were happy to move to cities — few really wanted to be a farmer,” Ott said. “But Americans have always liked to imagine that we are farmers at heart, because of those agrarian values. Working in soil creates honest, good people, and this, in turn, creates a strong democracy — these are the niche stories Americans like to tell about ourselves, whether they are true or not.”
Because pumpkin was the largest fruit — and because it had little to no market value — it came to represent the agrarian ideal, the wholesome mascot of this collective farmland longing. The formerly spurned squash began showing up in romantic poems, paintings and other artwork. It would only be a matter of time before it showed up in lattes and muffins and other seasonal treats — things that taste so good to us, Ott noted, partially because of the deep meaning we imbue them with… consciously or not: “When you take something like pumpkin and you sweeten it, you’re sweetening the ideas associated with it, too.”
The country’s most maligned crop had finally made a comeback.