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139 i Six j AtlanticGiantstoJack-Be-Littles The Changing Nature of Pumpkins, 1946 to the Present T hose nicked, crooked, and cockeyed pumpkins on display in bins from the early years of the Circleville Pumpkin Show and pictured in the 1940s FSA photographs of roadside stands are no more. Now, pumpkins—real pumpkins—are as beautifully orange and perfectly round as the painted ones in Ehninger’s 1867 bucolic harvest scene and Rockwell’s 1945 Thanksgiving illustration. The ideal pumpkin is no longer one that will last through winter or nourish a cow but one that is “smooth and glossy orange-yellow in color with a round shape of good uniformity,” as Burpee’s 1975 seed catalog advertised.1 A rise in pumpkin sales has matched the changes in the vegetable’s appearance. The U.S. pumpkin harvest of 71,700 tons in 1949 more than doubled to 195,300 tons in 1959 and then leaped to 1.1 million tons in 2007.2 The use of pumpkins as livestock fodder, a practice that helped solidify the vegetable’s association with small-scale subsistence agriculture in the nineteenth century, plummeted by the mid-twentieth century, from 17,645 tons in 1939 to 794 tons in 1954.3 After 1954, the U.S. Agricultural Census stopped recording data on the use of pumpkins for animal feed altogether. By 2007, 87 percent of pumpkins were not even eaten but were put on display as Halloween and autumn decorations. The pumpkin ’s symbolism has become so much more important than its meat that many varieties, such as those sold by Burpee’s, have become eye-catching wonders at the expense of fertility and palatability. Pumpkin foods do not even have to contain the vegetable; they can simply take the shape of it. 140 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles “Pumpkins mean crisp air and pies and smiles on an October night. Never nutrition,” explained an observer in 1979.4 This light-hearted quotation from an airline magazine nicely sums up the pumpkin’s positive associations in the late twentieth century, and the impracticality of it all. The same sense of natural goodness that Americans associate with the pumpkin permeates the cornucopia, so common in seasonal decorations and on greeting cards, and, especially, the new version of the jack-o’-lantern , which has become a kind-hearted natural spirit instead of the wily trickster it was in the early twentieth century or the volatile, frightening pumpkin imp seen in Renaissance art.5 An affinity with the natural world permeated all facets of American society and culture beginning in the 1960s, especially among the affluent and expanding middle class. Distressed by widespread pollution and the development and disappearance of wild places, many Americans cast modern society as a villainous abuser of an innocent and life-sustaining natural world. The passage of milestone environmental protection laws such as the Wilderness Act in 1964, the Clean Air Act in 1970, and the Clean Water Act in 1972; an increase in the membership enrollment and political influence of environmental nonprofits such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council; and the popularity of outdoor recreation, back-to-the-land movements, and natural foods are benchmarks of the modern environmental movement in the second half of the twentieth century.6 But nature appreciation also took more prosaic and less conspicuous forms, such as attachment to pumpkins. When most Americans think about communing with nature, they probably do not think about celebrating Halloween, but its festivities say a lot about how Americans imagine the natural world around them. While adult costume parties and parades still define the holiday, they share the night with children walking from door to door in costumes, yelling “Trick or treat!” to be rewarded with candies from their neighbors . The tradition started in the 1920s and became more popular with post–World War II suburbanization and the baby boom. Pumpkins ranging from a single jack-o’-lantern to more elaborate displays greet neighborhood children.7 Some homes metamorphose into haunted-house extravaganzas, with cobwebs stretched across bushes, faux gravestones planted in yards, paper skeletons hanging from porch rafters, and glowing jack-o’-lanterns perched on doorsteps. Others highlight a country Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 141 feel, with hay bales, pumpkin-headed scarecrows, cornstalks, folk-artstyle wooden pumpkin cutouts, and fresh pumpkins piled decoratively near potted mums.8 Although the themes of death, the supernatural, and wild nature still figure prominently at Halloween, their representative ghouls are tame and benevolent by historical standards. Jack-o’-lanterns and other Halloween creatures have become childlike cartoons such as Casper the Friendly Ghost or, in other cases, nurturing, New Age caregivers. Greeting cards, toys, and books often portray the jack-o’-lantern with big round eyes and a goofy grin rather than a threatening grimace. And perhaps most significantly , instead of being a two-legged beast, the new jack-o’-lantern has, as one poet put it, “nothing underneath”—it is just a head.9 Amputating and disembodying this symbol of wild, primitive nature nullifies its danger. Without a body to propel it, the jack-o’-lantern is powerless to act on its own will and wreak havoc. Replacingthevolatileandmischievouscreaturedepictedinearlytwentieth -century Halloween memorabilia is a comforting and compassionate Spring Hope, North Carolina, October 2000. Like many other American households, this one marks the fall season with pumpkin yard decorations. Photo: Cindy Ott. 142 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles guardian spirit. A 1999 poem offers a glimpse of this new jack-o’-lantern personality: Pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin bright, When my “Tricks or Treats” are said, Will you light me to my bed, Kind old father pumpkin head?10 Thetransformationowesmuchtotherisingpopularbeliefsinthehealing power of nature.11 Pumpkin Light, a 1993 children’s book, is one of many tales about a pumpkin with magical powers. In the story, a jack-o’-lantern saves a boy named Angus, who was born on a day when “the sun rose like a shining pumpkin.” After Angus disobeys his parents, a mean scarecrow turns the boy into a dog, and the only way he can be transformed back is for someone to carve a magic pumpkin into a jack-o’-­ lantern. The tale’s narrator states about Angus, “Sometimes he thought he could almost hear sounds from deep within the pumpkin. As if messages from the sun and the moon somehow entered through the pumpkin’s stem to rest among the silent seeds.”12 At the end of the story, Angus’s mother carves the pumpkin and thereby returns the boy to his rightful form. In this fairy­ tale, the jack-o’-lantern offers salvation and restores the human spirit with the power of its natural forces. Thismagicalcharacteralsoappearsinoneofthemostpopularcontemporary jack-o’-lantern tales, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, a holiday television special based on the beloved Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz.13 The syndicated comic, which ran from 1950 to 2000, follows a boy named Charlie Brown, his dog Snoopy, and the kids in his neighborhood . It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown has aired every year since 1966. In the story, Linus, the philosopher of the group, treks out to his pumpkin patch on Halloween night to await the Great Pumpkin’s arrival while the other kids attend a holiday costume party. According to Linus, “The Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch, and flies through the air and brings toys to all the children in the world.” Alas, to Linus’s great consternation, the Great Pumpkin never appears in his patch, but he holds out hope for its return the following year. While Linus’s friends ridicule him for believing in a pagan spirit in modern times, the audience feels compassion toward him and his faith in an idyllic supernatural force. Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 143 The affiliation of pumpkins with children, dating back to the midnineteenth century, remains as powerful as ever, because the two mutually reinforce the themes of natural exuberance and goodness. Photographs of a small child sitting on or holding a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch or dressed up as a pumpkin in a Halloween costume are ubiquitous in calendars, office cubicles, studio portraits, and just about every American newspaper in the month of October. Children’s stories meld one with the other. For example, “The Ugly Pumpkin” (1970) mimics the classic ugly duckling tale but substitutes a “lopsided runt” pumpkin that becomes a handsome jack-o’-lantern. Peter Pumpkin (1963) is a coming-ofage story about a boy pumpkin learning how to be a man.14 “Pumpkin” is a common term of endearment for children.15 A 1995 Libby’s advertisement for canned pumpkin includes a photograph of two cheerful toddlers sitting inside a giant pumpkin, suggesting that the contents of the can are as sweet and wonderful as two rosy-cheeked babies.16 Both the pumpkin and the babies exude happiness and well-being. As Americans made Halloween spooks sweeter and more benevolent than the frightening supernatural forces that traditionally ruled the night, they increasingly conceived of people as the instigators of mayhem. Jack the Ripper aroused more fears than a jack-o’-lantern.17 Activities on Halloween ranging from minor pranks such as tossing eggs at cars, covering front-yard trees with toilet paper, and smashing pumpkins to sinister acts of violence such as lacing candy with poison and placing razor blades in apples have superseded invisible threats from above on Halloween night, even though the more serious offenses have never been verified.18 In the 1998 movie Sleepy Hollow, based on the Washington Irving tale, director Tim Burton resurrected the older, more haunting jack-o’lantern through the movie’s main protagonist, a terrifying and murderous ghost.19 Deviating from the original tale, the Headless Horseman in the movie stalks and decapitates townfolk in its quest to find its long-lost head. (The film also depicts pumpkins, anachronistically, as glowing jacko ’-lanterns, which did not appear in the original 1832 version of the tale.) While the audience is first led to believe that this wild, supernatural spirit is responsible for all the bloodshed, they discover in the end that a woman is the culprit. The ghost of the Headless Horseman is simply a pawn in her sinister plan to avenge the mistreatment of her family when she was a child. By concluding that the real danger is human acts, not natural or 144 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles supernatural ones, the movie reasserts the popular belief that wild nature offers joy and solace while human beings harbor threats of evil and terror. Contemporary artists, writers, and filmmakers have kept alive ageold negative gender stereotypes, and many of their works corroborate the menacing image of people at Halloween. James Wyeth’s Pumpkinhead —Self‑Portrait (1972) conjures up the Headless Horseman by picturing himself wearing a black overcoat and a large pumpkin head carved into a sliver-eyed, grinning jack-o’-lantern.20 He stands in a vacant field with a dense white sky overhead, reminiscent of a late autumn day. The setting instills in the character a sense of earthiness and coldness. The painting is both a playful self-mockery and a portrait of the mystery and savagery of the artist’s mind. Quentin Tarantino’s black comedy Pulp Fiction, released in 1994, features its own disturbing version of this male personality type, one who lies beyond the controls of society and is guided by brute natural instincts.21 “Pumpkin,” played by John Travolta, is a likable common criminal with an evil streak, somewhat simple-minded but also deadly violent. His persona is evocative of several short story characters, such as the protagonist James Wyeth (American, b. 1946), Pumpkinhead— Self-Portrait, 1972. Oil painting, 30 by 30 inches. Private collection. Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 145 of “Pumpkin,” a 1986 story by Bill Pronzini about a man who becomes possessed by “a telepathic evil pumpkin,” turns into a madman, and kills his wife.22 The moral of these stories is that seemingly good people can be capable of evil deeds. The authors use the pumpkin to express the wild and demonic alter egos.23 Unlike the Great Pumpkin, who personifies the benevolent powers of nature, the pumpkin man teems with wrath and danger. Perhaps not quite so evil but certainly troublesome is the pumpkin -headed politician, who persists as a popular motif. During the 1999 Democratic presidential primary, for example, the Washington Post published a Jeff MacNelly cartoon called “The Great Debate,” which depicted two pumpkins perched on podiums and carved into faces mimicking those of candidates Bill Bradley and Al Gore.24 After thousands of years and hundreds of generations of political leaders, this pumpkin iconography remains as viable as the belief in the pompousness and buffoonery of politicians remains strong. Recent scientific studies document what popular writers have said for generations—the smell of pumpkin pie increases sexual desire.25 When Philip Roth, in Portnoy’s Complaint, nicknamed the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant girlfriend of his young Jewish male protagonist “Pumpkin,” he tapped directly into the familiar gender trope of the promiscuous woman.26 The female protagonist in Penelope Mortimer’s 1963 novel The Pumpkin Eater, which became a Hollywood movie based on Harold Pinter’s screenplay in 1965, and in Susanna Hofmann McShea’s 1992 The PumpkinShell Wife offer harsher portraits of pumpkinish women.27 Like the fabled wife of Peter Pumpkin Eater, these women disregard the rules of society, such as fidelity in marriage, but with direr consequences. In The Pumpkin Eater, the central character is chastised by her friends for having several husbands and many more children. Broken marriages and sorrow are her destiny. The fortunes of the New En­ gland housewife in The Pumpkin-Shell Wife are even grimmer. She is murdered during a venture into New York City to meet her lover. Alongside the modern-day pumpkin fables about immoral women reaping their just rewards for lecherous behavior, “pumpkin” has also become shorthand for a frumpy woman, like Cinderella before the ball. For example, in the fall of 1999, a Washington, D.C., sports club advertisement for new members said, “This could be the last Halloween you’ll have to go as a pumpkin.”28 In a similar vein, at the 2000 American 146 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles Academy of Motion Picture Awards, winner Marcia Gay Harden said she felt like “queen for the day,” wearing her designer dress and two million dollars’ worth of Harry Winston jewelry. Yet “after this is all over,” she commented, “I’ll turn back into a pumpkin.”29 When Americans put pumpkins on their front stoops for Halloween, they turn the pumpkin into a sign of friendliness, complicating any simple distinction between benevolent nature and corrupted humanity. On Halloween , many Americans transform their private homes into community spaces by inviting neighbors to come to their doors. The pumpkin serves symbolically as a latchkey because trick-or-treaters usually approach only houses with a lit pumpkin out front. The popular home entertainment specialist Martha Stewart demonstrated how to line a walk with pumpkin lanterns so people could find your door. “You needn’t express your artistry with a traditional jack-o’-lantern,” advised an article in the October 1998 issue of Martha Stewart Living. “Elegant pumpkin lanterns look at home in the most sophisticated settings, and cast a welcoming light for any visitor.”30 Putting a jack-o’-lantern in front of the house is a neighborly act of good will. Belvedere Street in San Francisco is one of thousands of American streets where residents go all out for Halloween by lining their doorsteps with masses of pumpkins every year. The street is aglow with flickering faces, enticing visitors from all across the city to be a part of the festive event. The sense of community forged with the pumpkin is what makes the teen prank of smashing pumpkins such an effective antisocial act (and a good name for a rock band). Smashing pumpkins destroys not only private property but also this totem of communal togetherness.31 Americans have turned the pumpkin into an abstract symbol of cultural values—in this case, neighborliness—and they widely rely on the actual, physical pumpkin to communicate their sentiment. These new ways of thinking about and displaying pumpkins have altered the very nature of the pumpkin itself. “Orange-amental” is how one South Carolina farmer described modern breeds of pumpkins. Emphasizing their aethetic qualities, he said, “I plant sugar babies not because they’re the best pie pumpkin—and they are—but because they’re small—just the right size and shape for kids; and they’re bright orange and have prominent ribs.”32 New pumpkin varieties such as Autumn Pride, Ghost Rider, and Spooktacular—voluptuous in shape, size, and Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 147 color—call forth romantic yet playful visions of nature and nostalgic memories of autumn. Seed catalogs boast about the cosmetic qualities of the fruits, describing them as “handsome,” “uniform and attractive,” and “well-colored and classy.”33 A few go a bit overboard. “Words cannot describe this beautiful pumpkin,” gushed the 1990 Holmes Seed Company catalog about the Spirit pumpkin.34 Many modern-day pumpkins are mere façades compared with their botanical predecessors. Some are hybrids with seeds that cannot reproduce; in others, the flesh is inedible.35 Some fruits are now so large that heavy machinery is needed to lift them. These physical liabilities are of little consequence today, because consumers view the fresh pumpkin more as a decoration than as a meal. People are more interested in its visual effect than its practicality. The variety Oz was bred to be uniform in shape and color, at the expense of palatability and potency. Its rind is beautiful, but its flesh is dry and stringy and its seeds are infertile. This pumpkin is essentially window dressing in comparison with the varieties that allowed colonial and nineteenth-century farms to thrive. Big Autumn and Autumn Gold have an “early coloring gene” that makes their fruit turn from green to orange before other types do.36 Growers value these varieties because they require a shorter growing season, which in turn provides a more flexible harvest period. Unlike in times past, when a fresh pumpkin’s usefulness spanned the winter months, it now terminates abruptly the day after Halloween, at least for the main consumer market.37 Changing color prematurely helps ensure that the crop will obtain the essential orange hue during the brief window of opportunity for sales. Even pumpkin stems are now engineered to be attractive and strong, so that people can easily pick up an individual fruit from the marketplace and carry it home. “Get a handle on the pumpkin business,” the 1986 Harris Moran catalog said about the Pankow’s Field pumpkin, which it advertised as having “remarkably big, sturdy ‘handles.’”38 Another alteration is the replacement of the Connecticut Field pumpkin with the Howden. In the early 1970s, John Howden, of Massachusetts, developed the Howden pumpkin to be a more standardized version of the antiquated variety. Harris Seeds described it as “a Connecticut Field type but far superior. Its size is more uniform, averaging 20–25 pounds, and the deep-round fruit are quite symmetrical. . . . it is much less apt to produce lop-sided fruit.”39 In testament to the way the vegetable now emulates 148 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles its cultural image, instead of the other way around, the Seed Savers 2001 Yearbook advertised the squat, deeply ribbed Cinderella pumpkin as being “similar to Disney’s ‘coach’ pumpkin.” Likewise, the white-skinned Casper pumpkin takes its name from the cartoon ghost.40 And with a name like Paint-a-Pumpkin, a hybrid with pale smooth skin, how could anyone think of eating it?41 In keeping with the maxim that form follows function, Gurney’s Seed and Nursery Company, in its 1998 catalog, marketed Jack-Be-Littles and Baby-Boos, miniature pumpkins that weighed no more than a pound, as “charming accent[s] for fall centerpieces.”42 The USDA classifies these tiny new pumpkins as a nonfood item, even though they are edible. Seed companies have reintroduced gourds and squash varieties such as Turk’s turban as tasteful additions to fall home decor. “Roadside stands find these ornamental squash command prominent prices for fall decorations ,” stated the Burpee’s seed catalog.43 These small, decorative pumpkins and squashes are akin to the endless variety of pumpkin novelties offered for sale every fall. Starting in the early twentieth century, jack-o’-lantern cardboard cutouts, plastic figurines , and tin noisemakers became popular Halloween party favors. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, consumers could stock up on pumpkin welcome mats, every assortment of dinner plate, baking dishes, Pez candy dispensers, candles, T-shirts, watches and earrings, and blinking flashlights, not to mention the sterling silver enameled pumpkin key chain on sale for $225 at Tiffany’s in the fall of 2001.44 Promoting a dizzying mix of natural and artificial qualities, and with no apparent sense of irony, the Cotton Gin’s fall 2001 catalog, under the heading “Naturally Country ,” offered “realistic handcrafted ‘faux’ pumpkins and gourds [that] will last for years.”45 If one judges the quality of a metaphor by the size of its image, then the ultimate symbol of nature’s abundance, or “Naturally Country,” has to be the Atlantic Giant (AG) pumpkin.46 Developed in the 1960s by Howard Dill, of Windsor, Nova Scotia, its dime-size seeds produce fruits that average between four hundred and five hundred pounds. Some reach almost a ton.47 An Associated Press photograph of Christy Harp, of Massillion, Ohio, with her 2009 world record 1,725-pounder is typical in the way it depicts the grower’s outstretched arms, unable to reach even halfway around the colossal body of orange flesh.48 A scene of a single Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 149 Page from Gurney’s Seed and Nursery Company’s 1998 spring catalog, Yankton, South Dakota. At the turn of the twenty-first century, producers bred pumpkins for display, at the expense of fertility and palatability. The Hybrid Frosty and Bush Hybrid Spirit, for example, produce seeds that cannot reproduce, but their fruits are symmetrical and attractive. 150 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles giant pumpkin shoehorned into the back of a pickup truck, or of an adult comfortably nestled inside a single specimen, documents the variety’s comically huge size. Every October, images and tales of its production are ubiquitous on television and radio, and in newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal.49 The enormousness of these pumpkins incites hyperbole. When a bystander at a giant pumpkin-weighing contest in Allardt, Tennessee , in 1995 asked how much a pumpkin weighed, someone replied, “I don’t know but I hear some boy took a picture of it and the picture alone weighed seven pounds!”50 Although many growers might protest, it is difficult to see Atlantic Giants as beautiful. Ribbed with orange to gray skin, giant pumpkins Christy Harp posing with her world record 1,725-pound pumpkin at the Ohio Valley Growers Weigh-Off in Canfield, Ohio, on October 3, 2009. Her world record has since been broken. Photo: Scott Heckel, Canton Repository. Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 151 are lopsided, rather obese, fleshy forms. A thick rind, sometimes measuring nearly a foot across, supports their enormous girth, yet the meat is dry, stringy, and practically inedible. The effort growers exert to nurture the plant are rewarded not only by prizewinning pumpkins but also by a sense of virtue that taps directly into agrarian myths about the value of hard work and toiling in the soil. And it is not just the size of the vegetable but the idea of the pumpkin that helps growers succeed. The outrageous proportions and orange color say as much about Americans’ passion for agrarian life as about the great natural proclivities of the plant. Giant pumpkins are made up not only of DNA but also of cultural values; inside that obese, lopsided vegetable lies the goodness of nature and agrarian virtues. The only thing small about a giant pumpkin is its seed. Seed selection is one of the most important factors in creating a giant among giants, because of both the seed’s natural genetics and the sense of cultural heritage it perpetuates. Almost all the seeds of the heavy hitters originated with Dill, who owned a U.S. patent for his variety. His Atlantic Giant is descended from the Goderich Giant, a cultivar used by William Warnock to produce the pumpkins that received national exposure at both the Chicago 1893 and St. Louis 1904 world’s fairs.51 Growers closely track the lineage or provenance of prizewinning pumpkins, just as if the plants were victorious racehorses. Dan Langevin’s 1993 How-to-Grow World Class Giant Pumpkins contains full-page genealogical charts for some of the heaviest pumpkins ever grown.52 Growers identify individual pumpkins by name of grower, year of production, and weight. For example, one grower on a popular AG listserv noted, “In 1995, George Lloyd crossed the 1994 614 Neilly with the 1994 752.8 Craven, producing the 687.5 Lloyd.”53 Some growers bid for seeds at online auctions, paying up to $1,600 for a single top-quality seed from a “stud pumpkin,” as the heaviest, better-pedigreed pumpkins are known.54 The fact that something called a “pumpkin expert” exists says a lot about the vegetable itself. Growers’ development of the science of giant pumpkin production and their creation of volumes of instructional materials infuse each individual specimen with a body of knowledge and a sense of biography. Pumpkins such as the “2009 1,725 Harp” come to stand for people, not just nature. The transformation from seed to prizewinner takes a combination of a human’s ingenuity and a plant’s natural proclivities. For most AG 152 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles growers, propagating a giant pumpkin is recreation, not a business.55 The 2010 record holder, Chris Stevens, is a contractor, and the 2009 record holder, Christy Harp, a high school math teacher. Yet this labor of love is an all-encompassing pursuit. Another grower, Don Block, a factory worker in upstate New York, is a good case in point. For several summers in the 1990s, Block spent countless hours in his garden cultivating giant pumpkins. He weeded, watered, fertilized, pruned, and carefully planned so that his pumpkins stayed healthy and reached their full potential weight. Block commonly trudged out to his patch two or three times a night to check for intruders, both quadruped and biped. When his well ran dry one year, he ran a hose three hundred feet from his pumpkin patch to his brother’s well and bathed at his sister’s house.56 Block is one of the thousands of stockbrokers, nurses, mechanics, office workers, and laborers of all sorts (rarely working farmers) who passionately and, some say, obsessively grow giant pumpkins. Unlike pumpkin farmers in the past, who were laissez-faire about their crop, AG growers incessantly pamper their pumpkins, leaving as little as possible to chance. Giant pumpkins require between 120 and 150 days to reach maturation, and during that time growers chart, record, calculate, and measure every aspect of the plant’s environment and development. Success depends on a delicate balance between providing the plant with enough water and nutrients for it to achieve its full potential weight and not overdoing it so that it cracks, rots, or, even worse, explodes before show time. The cultivation of these pumpkins is neither easy nor cheap. Participants commonly speak of skipping summer vacations to tend to their plants. Wayne Hackney, a TV repairman from New Milford, Connecticut , estimated that growing an AG pumpkin “cost me a dollar a pound.” But, he added, “it was worth it.”57 Propagating a giant pumpkin takes personal commitment. Growers must hand-pollinate the female flowers to ensure the desired genetics . Once the fruit begins to set, the grower removes all but the strongest vine, so that the plant’s energy is fully directed toward one or sometimes two fruits. Growers often clip and trim vines so that they grow in a direction that maximizes the fruit’s expansion. They use all kinds of contraptions to protect the plant in every stage of its development. Seedlings have their own little greenhouses to warm and protect them from chilly spring winds. At the end of the season, blankets and canopies provide each fruit Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 153 with its own private shelter from the heat of the summer sun. Growers wage constant battles against insects and disease. Estimates of how much water a pumpkin should consume are variations on the same oversize theme. One grower calculated that he gave his pumpkin three hundred gallons a day. Another claimed to give his eighteen hundred gallons of water at a single serving.58 Water is so important because a pumpkin turns water into pounds of flesh. Harp’s pumpkin gained thirty-three pounds a day during its peak growing time.59 Another grower watched his pumpkin grow dramatically at a rate of more than an inch every three to four hours.60 One scientific study found that a giant pumpkin grows as much as eleven kilograms a day, and another recorded pumpkins growing at a rate of one gram per minute.61 As one expert noted with both awe and trepidation, giant pumpkins “grow so fast they can literally tear themselves apart!”62 Moving these five-hundred-plus-pound pumpkins from garden to weigh-in at the end of the season is obviously no easy task. Elaborate pulleys and levers have been created just to pick the pumpkins up. Without any mechanical contraptions, five or six people are required to surround and lift it. Growers of giant pumpkins communicate through a network of organizations, such as the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, the World Pumpkin Confederation, the International Pumpkin Association, and the Giant Urban Pumpkin Growers of America, now defunct, which was “dedicated to growing and venerating giant urban pumpkins.”63 The organizations have local and regional chapters and hundreds of thousands of members. Growers post messages monthly on dozens of Internet sites dedicated to the “sport.” One website, “BigPumpkins.com,” received thousands of messages in the summer of 2010.64 Growers seek and give advice and offer congratulations and condolences to those who pursue the production of scale-breaking, super-sized pumpkins. The aim of most giant pumpkin growers is to compete in one of dozens of annual pumpkin weigh-offs staged across the continent. Warnock’s 403-pounder, presented at the 1903 St. Louis World’s Fair, held the world’s record until 1976, when a 451-pound pumpkin won the U.S. Pumpkin Contest in Churchville, Pennsylvania. Howard Dill, the only repeat performer , then held the record from 1979 to 1982 with pumpkins weighing just under 500 pounds. Nowadays, a 500-pounder is dismissed as a lightweight among the elites of the sport. In 1996, Paula and Nathan Zahr were 154 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles Growers inspect the underside of a giant pumpkin being lifted for weighing at the World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay, California, on October 12, 2009. Photo: PI/Terry Schmitt. Howard Dill sitting in a patch of Atlantic Giants, the variety he developed in the 1960s. All prize-winning giant pumpkins originated with Dill’s Atlantic Giant seeds. Photo: Don Langevin and GiantPumpkin.com. Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 155 awarded a $50,000 prize for being the first to surpass the coveted 1,000pound mark, with a 1,061-pound pumpkin, a record that some compared to breaking the four-minute mile.65 Chris Stevens, of New Richmond, Wisconsin, claimed the world record in 2010 with a 1,810.5-pounder he entered at the Stillwater Harvest Fest and Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Stillwater, Minnesota.66 The great lengths to which growers go to produce such fantastically huge, unwieldy vegetables was questioned by one of their own. “We’re overfeeding them. We’re overwatering them. It’s like we’re growing a fat person . . . and it is not as healthy as a lean person,” said Edward Gancarz, who won the 1990 World Pumpkin Confederation title with an 816-pound pumpkin.67 His skepticism about the process and the product raises an obvious question. Why do so many people—nonfarmers at that—exert so much effort, and to what ends? What is the fuss all about? Perhaps it is the contest prize money. Christy Harp won $2,500 for her 1,725-pound effort.68 Perhaps it is the love of competition and working in the garden. But why a pumpkin? One obvious reason is that the pumpkin is big. It is a thrill to produce such a huge specimen. World record holder Harpsaid,“Igrowgiantpumpkinsbecauseit’sfunbeingoutsideandreally neat to be able to test nature and see how fast these things can grow.”69 Because the pumpkin is a “live product,” to use the words of Howard Dill, its growth is never fully predictable.70 Even with many human interventions and additives to push plant growth to extremes, the pumpkin is still a natural object that cannot be completely manipulated. Although these qualities are true of almost any plant, the pumpkin’s tremendous size, output , and animated growth have made it a particularly powerful object of nature to defy, or “test” in Harp’s words, human control. When growers produce the biggest pumpkin possible, they are creating a gigantic plant but also a natural symbol that has deep cultural roots. If grand size was the only factor that motivated these growers, then a giant squash should be just as popular, but it decidedly is not. As one expert grower noted, “The real show stoppers are the giant pumpkins.”71 Both Stevens’s and Harp’s pumpkins were pale orange with streaks of gray, and if they had been grayer in color, they would have been disqualified from competition. Dave Stelts, who grew a 1,662-pound, deep orange pumpkin in 2009, said, “We’d like to have them all this beautiful—a nice, shiny, bright orange color. But sometimes they get a little opaque, like you 156 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles see in the world record-holder for the Harps. But with this one we got really lucky. It turned out a beautiful, shiny orange.”72 Though growers all hope for that vivid orange hue, some AG seed stock produces fruit that is orange, and some turns out bluish gray. Sometimes growers cannot be certain about what they are propagating until the fruit sets. The World Pumpkin Confederation has a rule that for an entry to be considered a pumpkin, “The fruit must be 80% orange to yellow.”73 As one giant pumpkin grower succinctly stated, “Squash are green, pumpkins are orange.”74 Most squashes are barred from pumpkin competitions, even though they are essentially the same vegetable. Competitions that make no distinction between the two types are disqualified from joining in the major weighoffs . There is no difference between a pumpkin’s and a squash’s genetics, cultivation, nurturing, and weight—only between attitudes toward them. Squashes compete in size and girth but not in sentiment. The giant pumpkin harks back to a field of meanings. A recurrent theme in the production literature is the celebration of the growers’ work ethic and generosity. How-to-Grow World Glass Giant Pumpkins referred to a top competitor at the “Big E” (Eastern States Exposition) as “a hard working, devoted family man who contributes much of his time to pumpkin growing organizations, the community and his church.”75 The veneration of the manual labor involved in cultivating giant pumpkins resonates with old agrarian myths about the virtues of working the land. Participants in the world of weekend pumpkin farming conceive of it as a morally and physically uplifting pursuit. By growing a giant pumpkin, someone can be close to nature and live out the agrarian myth in his or her own backyard, on the rooftop patio of a downtown Los Angeles apartment building, or in the thickets behind a museum in an inner-city neighborhood .76­ Pumpkins—historically the least commodified field crop—lend great symbolic weight to growers’ endeavors. “Best of all was the simple, irrelevant quality of it all,” explained one grower. “You planted and nourished this little seed, and you got this enormous gourd in a fluorescent color that was good for just about nothing except gawking at.”77 The combination of pumpkins’ physical attributes and their historical associations make them quintessential emblems of agrarian prowess. By growing giant pumpkins, suburban and urban dwellers gain access to the farming experience and thereby feel as if they are closer to nature and the mythic American agrarian way of life. Full-time pumpkin farming Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 157 is impractical and probably inconceivable to most participants. Besides having neither the land nor the equipment to run a full-scale pumpkin farm, what would most of these people do with two hundred 20-pound pumpkins? One 400-pound giant pumpkin, however, suits suburban needs because growers can create the ultimate farm symbol at an incredible scale but in limited space. Giant pumpkins require great skill to produce , while being difficult to move as well as mealy and tasteless. Growing giant pumpkins epitomizes the modern celebration of the symbolism of the pumpkin over its substance. It is no wonder that champion grower Edward Gancarz believed there was something unnatural about the vegetable : it is as much a container of human values as a wonder of nature. Pumpkins big and small are commemorative objects, like souvenirs. Rather than possessing intrinsic worth, they are valuable as holders of memories, experiences, and ideas. A souvenir fulfills a person’s yearning to feel connected to a place, another person, or a way of life unobtainable in any other way.78 One cannot go back in time, for example, but one can buy an object that represents an earlier time. Most people say they buy and display pumpkins every fall because it is a tradition, and the most famous giant pumpkin grower, Howard Dill, professed simply, “There is always something about a giant pumpkin that has the power to make people happy.”79 But the pumpkin does much more than that. It helps people feel close to nature and rural life, and it creates a sense of community. Because a souvenir’s value derives mainly from the meanings it possesses , it can take any size or material form. That is why a plastic, wooden, or crystal pumpkin may serve the purpose of a real one. The same principle holds true for food. While manufacturers of pumpkin products make nutritional claims, the food’s real value derives from what it represents. The importance of the idea of pumpkin over its substance has completely outweighed the necessity of a food’s containing even a trace of the vegetable .80 Hence, the product needs only to resemble it. Biting into Jell-O’s Halloween Creepy Jigglers, which consist of orange-colored gelatin set in a jack-o’-lantern mold, one tastes the sweetness of sugar but not a trace of pumpkin. Godiva pumpkin truffles are each wrapped beautifully in orange foil and capped with a tiny, curly stem and a green leaf. The candy contains lots of sugar, butter, chocolate, and pumpkin spice (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and allspice) but barely a hint of powdered pumpkin. “Linus’ Great Pumpkin Cookies” is a Pillsbury’s product consisting of a 158 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles tube of sugar cookie dough with an image of an orange jack-o’-lantern set in it. Home bakers simply slice, bake, and serve the cookies. Each contains a happy jack-o’-lantern face but no trace of real pumpkin.81 Of the 13 percent of pumpkins now produced for culinary purposes, 80 percent are sold as canned pumpkin between September and January.82 An ad in the October 2000 issue of Cooking Light, which read “American Spoon Goods brings the . . . mellow taste of autumn with its Pumpkin Chipotle Roasting Sauce,” promoted pumpkin as the essence and flavor of fall. Pumpkin inundates restaurant menus, cooking magazines, and grocery stores, both plain and fancy, every autumn. Adding to the traditional pumpkin pie are pumpkin pasta, ice cream, cookies, muffins, and bread, as well as soups served in an edible mini-pumpkin tureen.83 Many books and articles about cooking with pumpkin are illustrated with antiquated harvest scenes. Holiday Pumpkins, a book of pumpkin crafts and recipes, opens with an image of a picturesque pumpkin field set against a verdant hillside, a view steeped in powerful ideas about the healing powers of nature and American country life.84 The product “Pumpkin Spice Cookies” epitomizes the deep meanings yet pumpkinfree quality of many pumpkin foods.85 It consists of a pumpkin-shaped cookie cutter, a small packet of pumpkin spice, and a recipe that calls for flour, sugar, and baking soda—but no pumpkin. The packaging says it all. The cookie cutter is attached to a card with a painting of a pumpkin field dotted with cornstalks, a typical nineteenth-century farm scene. Even some natural foods businesses, such as the online Pumpkin Seed Health Food Store, have built their reputations on the pumpkin’s symbolic wholesomeness.86 Tapping into the pumpkin’s connotation of American heritage, some microbrewers produce a pumpkin beer for sale during the fall season. Although most contemporary brews contain at least a trace of actual pumpkin, many acquire their flavor not from pumpkin but from pumpkin pie spices, which were absent from the eighteenth-century beverage.87 Post Road Pumpkin Ale draws directly on the colonial origin of the beverage in its advertising but presents the drink in a more positive and romanticized light than is probably warranted by its earlier, rather squalid reputation . “In the 18th Century, colonial Americans brewed wonderful and interesting ales by using local ingredients,” the label explains. “Pumpkins were favored by brewers for their rich spicy flavors, which melded Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 159 perfectly with the malted barley. Post Road brings you a delicious rendition of this traditional American classic.”88 Most colonists would probably have balked at this description; to them, pumpkin beer was a drink of last resort. All these pumpkin culinary treats, of course, are secondary to the most revered tradition of eating pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. Echoing American Farmer almost two hundred years earlier (and sources from almost every generation in between), the November 2000 issue of Martha Stewart Living advised, “For many, without pumpkin pie, it’s just not Thanksgiving.”89 Innovations in preparing and serving pumpkin pie have done nothing to diminish the deep sense of tradition and heritage in the holiday dessert. The pie’s popularity is matched only by the endurance of these beliefs and meanings. Rows of sentimental holiday cards, dozens of holiday magazines, popular TV programs, children’s books, and elementary school programs revere the same colonial New En­ gland motifs and country themes that brought the pumpkin and the Thanksgiving holiday “Pumpkin Spice Cookies ,” cookie cutter and spices, manufactured by Bark and Barkley, Inc., 1995. 160 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles to national prominence during the Civil War. The eternal popularity of Lydia Maria Child’s famous poem, “Over the River and Through the Wood,” speaks to the continued relevance of the countryside and pumpkin pie as sources of national and familial heritage. Except for those who make restaurant reservations instead of cooking at home, Americans have changed their Thanksgiving celebrations little over the last fifty years. Millions still look forward to family reunions capped by an early evening feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, yams, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie—or some modern or other cultural rendition of this classic feast. Pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin crème brûlée, and, for the vegans, tofu pumpkin pie are novelty twists on the traditional pie recipe, yet “plain old pumpkin pie,” as the November 2001 issue of Bon Appétit called it, is still “a comforting favorite.”90 Marvelous Market, an upscale bakery in the Washington, D.C., area, marketed its “Pilgrim” pumpkin pie as being “about as traditional as you can get.”91 The pie that Amelia Simmons concocted in 1796 is essentially the same recipe used today. Bakers still mix pureed pumpkin with cream, sugar, cinnamon, and ginger, although the addition of Jell-O, Cool Whip, and a ready-made crust can give the dessert a peculiarly contemporary flavor.92 As predicted in the 1930s, the convenience of the can has outweighed strict adherence to culinary traditions, despite some retailers’ claims. Fresh pumpkins are more likely to show up on a front stoop than on a kitchen table, and heirloom recipes now require a can opener instead of a knife. Noting the sense of nostalgia and tradition that pie made with Libby’s brand pumpkin inspires in her family, a consumer on the “Chowhound ” website wrote in 2005, “I have to think the fact that we’ve had Libby’s pumpkin pie every Thanksgiving in my life has something to do with it.”93 According to company records, Libby’s produced 85 percent of the approximately 222,000 tons of canned pumpkin packed annually in the early 2000s.94 Responding to an increase in pumpkin demand, in 1973 Libby ’s transferred its pumpkin processing from its Eureka, Illinois, plant, where it also canned corn and peas, back to its Morton, Illinois, plant, which it devoted solely to pumpkin. When Nestlé USA, a conglomerate of food and beverage companies, purchased Libby’s in 1991, it sold the Eureka and Washington, Illinois, factories and concentrated all its efforts on processing pumpkin at Morton. The growth in production must have Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 161 fulfilled the company’s wildest expectations. In the 2010s, Libby’s rolled out enough cans to produce 90 million pumpkin pies annually.95 Libby’s developed a special pumpkin variety specifically for canning. The Libby’s Select is a hybrid of the Dickinson pumpkin, which is one of the most popular processing pumpkins and the namesake of the family that established the canning factory in Morton. Bred for its thick orange flesh with little concern for its exterior attributes, the Libby’s Select is an oblong, slightly ribbed “pumpkin” with beige skin and brilliant orange flesh. In other words, it does not fit the picturesque model. It would be a poor Halloween decoration, but it makes a great pie. Everything about the vegetable is suggestive of a squash, but the company calls it a pumpkin for obvious reasons. Pumpkin inspires feelings, meanings, and traditions that squash does not. Libby’s advertises that its product is as “pure” as the vegetable on the vine. In one way, it is hard to argue with the company because, as its label ensures, the can contains 100 percent pumpkin, with no additives, preservatives, or sweeteners. Yet as anyone knows who has cooked with both processed and fresh pumpkin, the two forms create quite different results. Canned pumpkin is thicker and more condensed. It produces a stronger flavor that requires fewer spices, and it sets more readily than fresh pumpkin. These differences are the result of canning. At the Libby’s factory, after the pumpkins are harvested from the fields, they are literally dumped from tractor trailers onto factory conveyor belts. They are washed and inspected, sliced, and chopped before being cooked, seeds, skin, and all. Next, the pumpkin mush is squeezed through presses to remove some of its water content and then channeled through pulping machines that separate the meat from the fibrous skin and seeds. Then it is pureed, reheated, and pumped into cans. The canned pumpkin is sealed and then cooked again in large pressure cookers before being labeled and packaged for shipment on tractor trailers and rail cars positioned inside the factory. In the words of a Libby’s pamphlet, rather than having to “scrub, cut, seed, bake, puree, ‘cook down,’ stir, and drain, and ‘cook down’ pumpkin again just to get enough meat (hopefully not too thin or watery) for one pie,” bakers can now simply spoon cooked and pureed pumpkin meat out of a can. The industrialization of pumpkin processing has not prevented Libby ’s from marketing pumpkin’s reputation for old-fashioned, natural 162 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles goodness. Besides the two cute babies sitting in the pumpkin, another Libby’s advertising figure is a grandmotherly-looking woman who appears on the company’s website offering a pumpkin pie in her outstretched arms.96 (Mrs. Smith’s, the largest commercial producer of frozen pumpkin pies, also refers to its concoction as an “old-fashioned” creation.)97 Eating pumpkin, the ads like people to think, is not just good for you but also inculcates family values. In stark simplicity, the cover of the Thanksgiving 2001 issue of Time— two months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11—depicted a pumpkin pie with an American flag stuck in the middle of it.98 During that time of national crisis, the illustration was a poignant reminder of Americans’ core values, cultural heritage, and sense of patriotism. When the country faced one of the worst acts of aggression and violence on home soil in its history, it turned again to Thanksgiving pumpkin pie to provide a sense of well-being and security, much as when Lincoln first declared the national holiday during the Civil War. “The Thanksgiving meal is a true gesture of comfort, friendship and love—a holiday feast full of symbolism and hope for the future,” wrote the editor of Bon Appétit in November 2001. “[It is] a meal that can be a haven of comfort, joy and goodness—the feast of thanks that has stood the test of time.”99 The pumpkin’s meanings do not resonate with all Americans, of course. For some, the Time cover might have been illegible. For ­ others, such as southerners who still push aside pumpkin pie for the more regional sweet potato pie, it might have seemed like Yankee bias. Yet one would have to look as far back as the early colonial days, when pumpkin was daily fare, to find a time in American history when the vegetable was more in demand than it is now. Even back then, people ate it more out of necessity than out of choice. Some Americans might view Mrs. Smith’s pumpkin pie with Cool Whip as a poor substitute for Amelia Simmons’s 1796 version .100 They might see the Paint-a-Pumpkin as a hollow gimmick in comparison with the Connecticut Field pumpkin, and the giant pumpkin as a worrisome mutation of nature. They might be concerned that processing and packaging farm goods such as pumpkins dislocates consumers from nature and from the people and places that produce their food.101 Yet pumpkin farmers from Half Moon Bay, California, to Comus, Maryland, and the residents of small towns from Pumpkintown, South Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles = 163 Carolina, to Keene, New Hampshire, would not be among them. Instead of lamenting modern-day pumpkins and traditions, they have capitalized on and commercialized them. Although creating hybrids that do not reproduce but are easy to paint and scooping out fruit from a can to recreate a colonial recipe might seem to contradict reason and expectation, neither compares to the feat of resurrecting small family farms and rural towns as viable economic enterprises in the twenty-first century. 164 < Atlantic Giants to Jack-Be-Littles Cover of Time magazine, November 19, 2001. Time Warner, Inc. ...

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