Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Pumpkins

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why pumpkins are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Pumpkins, known for being orange, famous for being spooky or pie. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why pumpkins are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there folks. Hey there, syphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone.

I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of Pumpkins? That was my first Halloween costume. My, I was just like when I was, I was almost, almost exactly one years old. Put me in one of those pumpkin jumpers where it's like real puffy.

So you're sort of surrounded by an orb made out of fabric. It's such a good baby costume because like baby can't really move around all that much anyway. So, you know, just like pumpkin. Yeah, right. They're round and cute. They're little pumpkin. Yeah.

Yeah. You could even hollow out a big pumpkin, put some wheels on it, and then it's a baby mobile. And I've seen pictures of really young babies inside of a little. a pumpkin is a trend now. And also our baby nephew did like a photo shoot with pumpkins and a fall setting. You know, it's a big youth thing. It really is. Other than that, I don't really like pumpkin pie. I think that's more of a textual thing for me. I don't really like the texture of it. But I love pumpkin flavor and other things that like pumpkin bread, pumpkin cupcakes. Oh, yeah. I mean, pumpkin spice stuff. Like, I don't, I don't like the drink necessarily because I'm not really

into Starbucks drinks, because that doesn't actually have the pumpkin in it. I think that's just the spices associated with pumpkin pie. But those are great spices, so I like them. It's a very nice squash, big fan. It is a squash, which I think people don't necessarily know. They just think it's kind of a separate thing. And folks, if you're a frequent if listener, this episode about pumpkins might be an exciting format for you. There is no numbers section and there is an unprecedented number of

takeaways. There will just be the little ghosts of some numbers throughout them. That's it. I mean, like I like statistics, but yeah, statistics quake in the presence of pumpkins, the ultimate squash. How can you measure a pumpkin, really? Also, pumpkin bite reminds me all the great pumpkin peanut strips with Linus. Amazing. And apparently a really interesting thing in Charles Scholes's life because people either thought he was being anti-Christian or two-Christian with the Great Pumpkin strips, which is interesting, because it's sort of a message about believing in a being and faith, you know. Yeah, I never, I was never offended by it. I always thought it was just kind of a sweet, just a sweet little thing that Linus did. It's one of the best

Linus things, yeah. So, like Linus, we don't need numbers. We just have faith. And it's not really a great segue, but I'm going with it. Stick to your guns. We just need faith in the pumpkin gods. That's all we need. And we're going to start with takeaways, because takeaway number one. Biologically, pumpkins are more of a concept than a thing. Oh, wow.

Interesting. Is this like a fish thing where it's like fish are so loosely related? Yes, if you see a fish, you can be like, that's a fish right there. but there's so many different species of fish and a lot of them are not super related. Yeah. Yeah, there is a biological family they're all in, but that's about as taxonomically specific as it gets. And they're really just all sorts of different squash species where some of the varieties we call them pumpkins and others we don't. And it's basically arbitrary what is a pumpkin.

All right. So like you said with fish, there's almost no such thing as a pumpkin. It's like a Supreme Court justice and pornography. I know it when I see it. Yes, it's truly visual, too. People are like, that looks like a pumpkin and that doesn't. And it has nothing to do with the genes or anything. Makes sense to me.

I'm going to shout out a lot of our sources right up top here. Two books this week. One is called The Complete Squash, A Passionate Growers Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gordes. Amazing that there's a book that's about that. It was extremely fun to look at, too, big pictures of pumpkins and squashes. Nice. And it's by gardening expert Amy Goldman. And the other key book this week is called Sweet Land of Liberty, a History of America in Eleven Pies, which I love.

It's very historical and cultural. I think you'd be more interested in history if it was more pie focused. That's true. Why all the wars? Why all the tariffs and, I don't know, colonization? Just pies. Explain the War of the Roses to me. in tart terms.

Oh, but there's a way. And that pie book is by award-winning food writer Rossi Anastopolo, who is also the in-house blogger for King Arthur baking. And then our first few takeaways also lean on digital resources from the University of Illinois, digital resources from Iowa State University, and reporting for NPR's The Salt Food Blog by Dan Charles. Pumpkins are basically made up. What we have is a set of plant fruits that we call pumpkins.

Also, they're what we tend to call a culinary vegetable, where they are really fruits and in some cases, berries. Yeah. Human cooks use them the way they use a lot of other things that are vegetables. I mean, I'm sure you're going to get into this, right, but like a lot of the things that look like the perfect pumpkin that we carved in jack lanterns are bred to look cool. But there are like actual pumpkins bread to taste good, and those are the ones that we used in cuisine more. Yeah, it turns out. It's a huge switch that happens all of the time, and you don't think about it if you're just carving jackal anterns. So squash are a kind of plant that we've actually defined, and the taxonomic name is a genus called cucurbita.

And they're also in a bigger family that includes cucumbers. That's why the name sounds that way. The cucurbidate genus of squash has many species in it, and we just kind of decide whether or not to call them pumpkins. Yeah, man. No gods, no kings. We get to say what pumpkins are. Yes. The mighty pumpkin council.

Even the name pumpkin, it comes from an ancient Greek word. There was a Greek word pepon, which means large melon. And then the French turned that into pompon, and the English turned that into Pompeon or Pompeon, and then colonial English people made it into pumpkin. So it's a weird, large melon word that has been arbitrarily assigned to various squash. Pumpkin's definitely the best word for it, honestly. Sometimes I feel like other languages get the words better for stuff, like pompal moose for grapefruit, nailed at French people. Way better. Pumpkin, though, is.

clearly the best one. It's very strong. Yeah. And also, these are all endemic to the Americas. People did a ton of cultivation and alteration of various species of squash from the Americas to an extent that stunned me. Key species here is one called Cucurbita Pippo, which is a very fun name, too, Pippo. That's very good.

You toss a Pippo in there, and I'm like, hmm, interested. That one species Cucurbita Pippo, it does include bright orange Halloween pumpkins. One of the most common kinds is called the Connecticut Field Pumpkin. But that's basically a tasteless culinary vegetable, in a way we'll talk about more later. But then that exact same species also includes everything from various ornamental gourds to acorn squash to the set of green vegetables that are sold under the names like marrow. and corgé and zucchini. I really love decorative gourds because they get so wacky. Some of them have like so many warts on them.

Colors get buck wild. You can't eat them. They taste like absolute garbage, but they look very cool. I loved them when I was a kid. Like when I found out that there were more Halloween decorations, gourd type decorations that you could get other than pumpkins, I lost my mind. It's like you can get like a squiggly thing with a bunch of bumps on it.

Yeah. Last Halloween, we made a point of getting a goblin-looking pumpkin with all kinds of warts. Yes. And in researching this, I learned the warts are just a product of either the amount of sugar or the amount of water that went into the pumpkin. It doesn't mean anything otherwise different, really. It's just little developmental funky stuff. Incredible. Yeah.

So they're the same still. But they look like goblins instead of beautiful. orange orbs. It's very cool. I'm a gourd appreciator, I would say. Me too. They're great. And yeah, that gourd or your jaco-lantern pumpkin is exactly the same culinary

vegetable species as zucchini. It's just been cultivated very, very, very differently. Well, I like a good zook as well, so I mess around with a good zook. Oh, they're great, yeah, especially rosen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's one plant species. Cucurbita Pippo is either pumpkins or completely not pumpkins. And then there are at least three other species of squash that also do this bonkers random thing.

Cucurbita Moschata is the scientific name for foods like butternut squash. But also completely different squash that we give names like Dickinson pumpkin. Some of it's pumpkins, some of it's not. We just made it up. So butternut squash would not be considered a pumpkin just kind of arbitrarily? Yeah, there are other cultivated culinary vegetables in its exact same species that are called pumpkins. Okay. And we just decided not to call butternut squash pumpkins, even though they're kind of pumpkin-y to me.

Yeah. I think I like butternut equally to pumpkins in terms of flavor, if not more. It's very good. Yeah. So that's another species that does this. And then the other two, there's one called Cucurbita, Argyrosperma, which contains a lot of, yeah, it contains a lot of gourds and squash. And one example in there is a vegetable that is either called Kushaw squash or Kushaw pumpkins with no logic. It's just what people happen to call it in their place.

I feel like pumpkins seem to be a very much vibe situation ship. So if you get pumpkins. pumpkin vibes from something, you can just call it a pumpkin. And no one's going to arrest you yet. We still have that freedom. The last one here is maybe the most vibes, because it's a species called Cucurbita maxima. And there's a lot of squashes in it, such as Hubbard squash and Cabocha squash. But there's also specific pumpkin varieties with names like Big Max or Dills Atlantic Giant. Wow. That makes it sound very impressive. I have seen giant pumpkins before. Are those what we're talking about, the big ones? Those are from all sorts of squash varieties. And it's

part of pumpkins being made up. Like if you're growing a giant pumpkin, you may or may not be growing a pumpkin. Okay. It's just whether it ends up pumpkin looking. Right. Got it. And then also globalization has made some of the things we call squash get called pumpkins later. And the big example is Cabocha, because that's a green winter squash developed in Japan after the Colombian exchange. And we used to call it a squash, but as U.S. culture has spread and U.S. Halloween has spread, people started calling it the Japanese pumpkin. All right. Just because they just felt like it. That's it.

No rules, only right. Now I want it outbacked pumpkin. But anyway. I was going to say, it seems like orange should be the qualifier for pumpkin, but then I realized there are like white pumpkins that are like exactly pumpkin shaped. And they're also colorblind people. So who am I? Who the hell am I to say what is or isn't a pumpkin?

Yeah. And apparently consumers are getting really into greenish ones because they look funky and gobliny. And the biggest reason kabocha are now being called pumpkins is art. The wonderful sculptor and visual artist Yayoi Kusama has been making giant Cabotcha sculptures. And she often titles them just the word pumpkin. And she told an interviewer, quote, pumpkins speak to me of the joy of living. They are humble and abusing at the same time. And I have and always will celebrate them in my art, end quote. I love this sculpture. It's got a bunch of, black dots on it.

I mean, it looks pretty big. I guess I don't know the scale of it. But yeah, looks pretty cool. Six meters tall, 5.5 meters wide. And she does these all over the world. And she also does those infinity mirror rooms and a lot of phallic art. She's just amazing. But one of her big things is a Japanese winter squash that we recently decided as a pumpkin just for vibes.

There are no real scientific orb. botanical rules for what squash are pumpkins. There's no species that is always a pumpkin or is always not a pumpkin. It's made up. Someone wants to call a pumpkin. Why the heck not? Just loosen up. It's true.

Being a stick in the mud about Halloween especially, cut it out. Yeah, come on, man. The spirits are loose. You can't worry about this stuff. Exactly. You got to go around with your spirit bonk and bats. and collect candy. Now I want the Ghostbusters to just have big clubs.

That's great. Yeah. Whiffle bats so that it's the air resistance. Something about that seems like that would be good against ghosts, but I'm not sure. We have a next couple takeaways that are also reality bending, such as what is a pumpkin. The next one touches on something we talked about. Takeaway number two. Modern pumpkin spice flavor is not made of pumpkins or made of spices.

What? Okay, I knew about it not being made out of pumpkin. That I got. The fact, there's no spices in it. Now I'm reeling. Yeah, this is pretty quick. And like you said, I knew the first half. People each fall talk about how, oh, it's not actually made of the

flavor of a pumpkin, and one reason for that is pumpkins almost don't exist. And also a lot of the common jack-o-lantern ones don't taste like anything. But also people will say pumpkin spices really just flavors like cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger and cloves and all spice. I guess the number there is five. There's five spices that often go into it. Which all rock. Like those spices are so good together apart. I love them all. Five out of five, great. Yeah. And the thing is putting a thing called pumpkin spice in drinks and treats has gotten so popular that for more than a decade now, food scientists have figured out how to do all of that artificially because it's a lot cheaper.

Whoa. Okay. So we've got a pumpkin spice serum. A lot of conspiracy theories are starting to make sense now. The cinnamon illuminati doesn't work. Okay. I was trying to make it one more. word, but it's just two words.

Simuluminati. Yeah, we're, yeah. The Simuluminati. There we go. NPR talked to food scientists back in 2014 who'd said, this is already a settled thing we've been doing. It's just cheaper synthetic versions of some or all of the spices for the large-scale Starbucks type pumping out pumpkin spice.

Yeah, I mean, if people are still like going after those, like the pumpkin spice flavored everything, I assume that the artificial. version of it does hit the spot. Exactly. And also, yeah, baked goods such as the pie does usually have the actual spices. Because that's how people bake, sure. Right. Yeah.

Well, at least like home baked stuff. Like it's maybe like if you have some kind of like mass produced pumpkin spice Oreo or something, right? Like that might use the artificial stuff. I don't know. Don't sue me Oreo. I'm just saying not sure. I'm not saying definitively.

It'll be three lawyers, two of them are in black suits, and then the one in the middle is in a white suit, and they're going to come after you. This case against you is double-stuffed. According to food scientist, Kantushelke, who works at a nonprofit called the Institute of Food Technologists, it's easy to synthesize the couple of key chemicals that feel like an entire pumpkin spice experience. And especially in beverages, that is what we expect for pumpkin spice rather than any of the actual spices grown biologically. And if you try to use the actual cinnamon or nutmeg or so on in a beverage, you get something that to an American palate tastes much more like chai tea from India rather than the trend drink. Okay. Okay, now I don't know. I don't really like the sweet drinks from Starbucks.

So now I'm intrigued. Like now I kind of want to try because I'd assume like, yeah, I know what pumpkin spices because I have had those spices in a variety of contexts. But now it sounds like I don't know anything. Yeah, I have like a blanket belief about trends, you know, like trending phenomena like pumpkin spice, where when you actually try them out, they're usually pretty normal. Yeah. When pumpkin spice started being a thing in magazines and so on, I had a pumpkin spice.

spice latte. It was a normal and good drink. There's really not a lot to it. And it's good. Now it's Labuboos. You know that, right? Oh, yeah. It's all Labuobu. Now it's all Labuobu. Our household has a Labuu. I don't know if I've shared this. Really? Yep. Is it a pumpkin spice liboubu? You know, it's a brownish color. But anyway, so not quite. Yeah. They're cute. I think they are cute. Right. And it's like that. It's pretty normal. It's just a cute thing. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think some people lose their minds over it, which is like, you know, but hey, look, there's a lot more stuff happening.

That too, yeah. With the whole pumpkin spice, the anti-pumpkin spice thing, I think was a part of a more general stereotype of like, of young women who would wear like, ugh boots, a certain type of like jacket, stretchy jeans. Yeah. They'd have their pumpkin spice lattes. And usually when there's like a trend, particularly when it's a trend that young women enjoy, it becomes like a punching bag for comedians and stuff because we don't, we view trends

that young women participate in as stupid. One million percent. On the other hand, like I think that like there's, when something gets wildly popular, I think it's good to have a healthy skepticism of it, right? If it's like overvalued, like I hate to say it. But, you know, if a lobooboo is extremely expensive, it's like it's a cute little guy. Oh, yeah. You know, it's like, sure, that's like overvalued.

I don't know if that ever happened with pumpkin spice though. Like were people, I'm sure the craze about it was disproportional to how good it actually was. But, you know, people like to try things and be a part of stuff. I don't think that's as big of a deal. Yeah, yeah, it's true. There was never people trying to get like a $100 pumpkin spice, but. Maybe. No, I'm not finding it.

It's usually only about $5, $5 to $8. That's a lot for a drink, though. Can I just say? If you do it every day, it's a lot. That's a lot. But anyways, people can enjoy stuff, in my opinion. That's fine. Same, yeah, especially young women.

You're fine. And you're usually setting trends. Yeah. There's one more takeaway here about modern pumpkin surprises, which is takeaway number three. You've probably never seen the kind of pumpkins you eat. Now, okay. But counterpoint, I have bought eating pumpkin that they told me is specifically for eating, and then we eat it. Oh, that's good.

I feel like that might have been an eating pumpkin. It doesn't really look like a – it does not look like the sort of – it looked weird. I was sort of like oblong and brownish. Exactly. Rather than being sort of like a nice little orange pumpkin. But, yeah. I intentionally hedged in the name of the takeaway and said probably because you've seen the exact one and if someone truly has done that they've seen it yeah I'm about to undermine your podcast segue in a hostile fashion um okay yeah but I mean I think that until like I come back from the break I'm like it's me Alex you're like prove it just just immediately against everything honestly before but I will say before I I moved to Italy, I don't think I'd ever actually seen one or handled it because it always

was, it was always very easy to get in a can. Yes. And here it's a lot harder to get in a can, but you can get the actual food pumpkin. Okay, that explains a lot, yeah, because this is also mostly an American and Canadian take away. Most of us in those two countries do not chop up and eat pumpkins. We get cans. We get like cans of puree or cans labeled 100% pumpkin.

And it is that, but it is not only a different pumpkin than the jack-o-lantern-looking ones, it's a totally different species from those. Whoa. Now that I didn't know. I figured it was just a tastier variant. Yeah, this goes back to the first takeaway where there's at least four species of squash that can be pumpkins or not. one of them is Cucurbita Moschata, the Dickinson pumpkin. That's what almost all of us eat. And it's like Katie said, it's a different size, it's a sort of oblong shape, and it's a tan or brown color. That's what you're eating. Oh, that's what this picture is.

I had it zoomed out. I thought they were walnuts. They look like walnuts, honestly, yeah. Yeah, from a distance. But yeah, this is what we got like to make. My husband likes to make risotto, which bless him because it's a long, boring process that I personally don't like, but he's into it. So he made some pumpkin risotto with one of these guys. It was really good.

Yeah, awesome. So, yeah, he's had the entire experience that most of us, including me, never have to the point that I had never seen one of these until researching the pumpkin episode. It is a little bit of a pain in the butt to cut it up. So we have found since then like found somewhere where they actually have it pre cut up into cubes for you. So it's basically one step away of the puree in a can. Okay, great. Yeah. Because yeah, it's also pretty laborious.

That's also part of why Americans and Canadians don't bother. Yeah, man. And we got that part right though, honestly. Yeah. And we'll have a picture linked of a giant harvest of these from a piece for all recipes.com. Kimberly Holland. We're also citing writing for serious eats.com by Genevieve Yam, writing for popular mechanics by Caroline Delbert. Wouldn't it be nice if J.K. Rowling's nominative determinism was as innocent as just naming someone, Gwynnevere Yam, because she writes about fall vegetables.

Genevieve, but still, yeah, Guinevere's even better. I'm sorry. No, Genevieve's a good name, too. Gwynnevere and Genevieve are both very like. I don't know. They're good names. Pretty strong. Very strong. Yeah. And so they all talk about Dickinson pumpkins.

And like every other pumpkin, this is a kind of squash that's been cultivated over the years into a specific shape and taste and color and everything. So the pumpkins you're eating are tan, they're oblongs sort of in the shape of a rugby ball or a rounder American football. Yeah. Yeah, they do look like rugby balls. They're smaller than most jackal lanterns. And it's the species Cucurbita Moschata. And again, most of the common decorative pumpkins are from cucurbita peepo, different species entirely. They're also like full of flesh.

So like when you have, if you've carved a jackal lantern, you know that even though there is a pulp on the inside, it's kind of stringy. There's not like a ton of it. It's not like super dense. It's kind of a stringy pulp that you can scoop out. Whereas with these guys, it is a lot of dense. dense flesh. So it's not really something that you can just like scoop out with a, with a spoon. It is, you know, it's like a melon, right, where you cut it up into chunks and they're dang tasty chunks. Yeah, like I know I like the taste of this because I've had canned pumpkin

or pumpkin puree or most people's pumpkin pie. It's really tasty, the Dickinson pumpkin. And the people who made Americans and Canadians eat a bunch of that are really one company. Back in the 1860s, a couple of businessmen in Chicago started a food company called Libby's. And Libby's now holds about 80% of the canned pumpkin market share in the U.S. Yeah, they are still doing it. I know Libby's. Most of us do. Either that or you get a store brand or something.

But Libby's is about 80% of all the cans. in the U.S. for all pumpkin eating, and all of their cans are made of a special proprietary variety of Dickinson pumpkins. And yeah, this is substantially more flavorful than most of the Jackal Lantern-type pumpkins, especially a Connecticut field pumpkin. It's just stringy and watery inside. Even if you roast it or spice it a bunch, it doesn't really taste like anything. The only part of jackal-lanterns we really ever eat are the seeds if we roast them. Otherwise, you're eating these different pumpkins. I think that the jack-o-lantern seeds are still solidly good, like, when you roast those.

Yeah, they're right. Yeah. Yeah. This leads to a strange thing where canned pumpkin usually has extremely accurate and extremely deceptive art and words on the can because the cans often say 100% pumpkin, you know? Like, I check the one in our cupboard. It says that.

I look at, yeah, it says 100% pure pumpkin. Yeah, you can. call it pure pumpkin. You can call it 100% pumpkin, but you can only do that because pumpkins are made up. Right. And we just decided this squash is a pumpkin. And then the art is usually a picture of a jack-o-lantern pumpkin, which is not what's going into the can. Most of them, I do see most of them, it's a slice of pumpkin pie. And then they have a, like, they have a smaller, like, little jack-o-lantern pumpkin on it. Yeah, like, that's especially a piece of pie, that's more valid as art and also, I guess, a tautology or something.

Like, if you're going to turn it into pie, it is a can of what goes into pie. Sure. It's sort of a trick, you know? I mean, aesthetically speaking, the jack-o-lantern pumpkins look a lot more appetizing than the actual weird oblong football pumpkins that taste good. Yeah. If someone presented that to you, and if you're anything like me, you would not know what it is. You're like, is this some kind of winter squash or something? I don't know. Yeah. It's the pumpkin you have mostly eaten your whole life. Yes. And the inside, so the insides of, even though the outside is kind of a dull tan color, the inside is bright, pretty bright orange.

Right. For the edible pumpkins. But not the outside. So that's what's deceptive. Yeah, that's also good news if you're a person who worries about food dyes or something, not that you need to, but What they can't, they don't usually need to color it a lot, if at all. Right. Inside, it's that color. Yeah, I mean, pumpkin pie usually turns out kind of a brownish orange through the baking process. But, yeah, the actual inside of the edible pumpkins are, I mean, not like a craft macaroni and cheese orange, but still orange. It's a very autumnal orange.

It's got deep tones to it. Atominal. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And, yeah, and the other reason it works. way is the state of Illinois. It turns out the state of Illinois is the leading pumpkin farming state in the U.S. and also ships a lot to Canada. They have hot and relatively dry summers, and according to pumpkin farmer Mack Condal in the town of Arthur, Illinois, the soil has lots

of boron and lots of molybdenum, which makes the pumpkins last longer on shelves, either for canning or for decoration. Man, that's what I was thinking. A lot of malibdenum, which makes the pumpkins. A lot of molybdom. Malibdenadi. There we go. Yeah. So this is for the decorative pumpkins? It's both, but especially the canning kind.

Apparently, four-fifths of Illinois pumpkin farms grow them specifically for canning. And then they can ship that everywhere because it's canned. So it's the molybdom that makes them more shelf stable? Yeah, especially, you know, the canning really does, but for the process of getting them into a can. Yeah, they last until that. Wow. So, yeah, so you're really eating like a tannish round squash thing from Illinois when you're eating what you think is puread jack-a-lantern.

Incredible. Yeah. Yeah. And this also well begs the question, why did people ever grow relatively tasteless pumpkins? Like, how did that exist and then last in order to become a decoration? Yeah, because I did, I do recall that sometimes in the grocery. grocery store, you'll see like pumpkin pie pumpkins. And they do, they are actually like small versions of the more decorative kind of pumpkins. And they're, they're usually denser and heavier.

And, you know, I don't, I have not really made stuff with those. So I cannot really talk about their taste. And those probably taste good. And they're the other exception besides pumpkin seeds for eating Cucurby to Pippo, the bright orange pumpkin. Because according to Amy Goldman's book, people have proceeded to develop recent and modern varieties of Cucurby to Pippo or varieties of orange-looking pumpkin-looking squash that do taste good. And her all-time favorite for pie is a variety named Winter Luxury Pie. Mm, winter luxury.

And it has pie in the name of the pumpkin. And it doesn't look like a giant, jack-o-lantern, but it's what you said, like, it's a small, round orange pumpkin. It often has a huge stem. That one is two-caribita-pepo and tastes good, but it's only from the 1890s. Art imitating life, and then life imitating art imitating life, because we're like, yeah, we're like, this is the pumpkin, and then we associated it with the edible, tasty pumpkins that looked nothing like the orange pumpkins. So then we made an orange pumpkin that tasted like the tasty pumpkin that we do eat.

Yes. Okay. It's great. It's so weird. You know, it's a lot better than a lot of things America has done. So I'm, it's cool. Yeah, and some that will come up later too. Oh, no.

So, yeah, there's varieties like the winter luxury pie pumpkin and the sugar pumpkin that are good for pies. They're just not Dickinson. And they also look a little orangier and Halloweenier. Right. Yeah. Wow. And also the story of why any pumpkins taste bad gets us into a takeaway thousands of years in the past.

It's takeaway number four. Early humans helped prevent the extinction of pumpkins by cultivating them as storage containers. Oh, this is amazing. I love a permanent gourd, a long-lasting gourd, one that like doesn't. grot. There are gourds that you dry them out and then now you have a little container. It's great. Yes. Yeah, there's cultures that have made that all over the world and not just out of specifically the cucuribidae genus of squash. There's other ones too. But in Mesoamerica, people started growing cucurby day squash as the first form of agriculture in Mesoamerica and to make them into

containers, not food. So that's part of how we got tasteless gross pumpkins. The thing I want to know, though, is that, like, with pumpkins, the modern ones, the jack-o-lantern ones, they rot. Like, it doesn't matter if you dry them out. It doesn't matter if you scoop them out. Like, they will start rotting. Yes.

Afterwards. So those could only be very temporary containers. That's right. And the ones used as containers, this started about 11,000 years ago, which was so long ago. but they were not like any of the pumpkin named squash today. They were heartier and tougher plants. Okay. Because I've seen like dried out gourds.

Yeah. And these are like those? Yeah, very gourdy. And in other parts of the world, they would be called calabashes. They're also called bottle gourds by modern historians and archaeobotanists. All right. All right. Also, this is archaeobotany, a field I had not really thought about.

Ancient botany. And yeah, and this happened with the broader family of various culinary vegetables across the world, especially in West Africa and in Asia, but also in North America. And so around 11,000 years ago, Meso-American people began planting squashes to be containers. And then another 3,000 years later, they progressed into developing them for food specifically. They did that about 8,000 years ago, which is about 4,000 years before, domesticating corn and beans and some of the other seemingly obvious crops of North America. I mean, it makes sense. It's important to have a thing to put stuff in.

Sure, yeah. And also kind of easier than making something that tastes good or that you're depending on for food. So they would basically be gathering and hunting and also beginning to grow boxes, you know, or bottles. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like how, like when you're planning an expedition, If you don't have a water bottle, like, that's it. There's no way you can go out and go on a hike. So you got to take care of that. Yeah, it's true. No, this makes sense to me.

I've played enough RPGs to know that, like, equipment space, storage space is very important. Yeah, I got to get coroc seeds and give them to Hesstu, and he dances. And then you have more weapons, shields, bows. Exactly. Yes, dang Khorak's always getting a mischief. I'm some kind of right-wing Korak politician. I'm telling them to visit their own friends by their own bootstraps. They need to pull themselves up by their little leaf straps.

Leaf straps, yeah. But yeah, and the other bonkers thing here with Archaeobotany is that the squash that we eventually turned into pumpkins almost went extinct when mastodons and mammoths died out. Oh, dear. This is a wild thing where apparently the science of archaeobotany, it's hard to find ancient plant remains outside of specific situations. Like one is the remains of cooking fires will preserve some stuff. And another one is fossilized animal droppings. So we have found fossilized mastodon poop in the modern state of Florida containing intact squash seeds from 30,000 years ago, is one example. All right. So they liked to chow down on a squash. Have you ever seen an elephant take like a squash or a melon and just like crunch into it like a grape?

Yeah. There was one Thanksgiving where we went to the Santa Barbara Zoo in California and watched two of their Asian elephants just mash pumpkins. It was great. They loved it. So just imagine that, but with some hair, some more hair. Yeah, exactly. And then the thing with those early squash tens of thousands of years ago, is that they were not good tasting and bitter and maybe even relatively toxic to humans because the way the species thrived is it tried to prevent humans and smaller animals from eating them

because they wanted to be eaten by large, large animals like mastodons and bully mammoths. Yeah, there's a lot of like plants that have a very specialized, either pollinator or seed distributor. Yeah. Why, just because mastodons would migrate, a lot? It's that. And also, when the mastodon pooped the seeds back out, it was a perfect amount of

giant amounts of fertilizer. Nice. Right? Like, they just take much bigger dumps than we do. They take mammoth-sized dumpies. Yeah. And so, according to archaeologists... I know. They're mastodons. I know. Slightly different. It's both, yeah. And according to archaeologist, Bruce Smith, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, pumpkins got almost a little bit too mastodon oriented. Right. To the point where mastodons and mammoths die out, and that almost makes these squash die out

because the animal they've really geared themselves toward being eaten by is gone. I mean, that's the current fear with agave, which is used to make tequila, is that the pollinating bats that are pretty much the primary pollinators for agave. Their populations are struggling. And so bats scientists are obviously very concerned about the bats because they love bats,

but they do like to point out like, hey, if you like tequila, got to save the bats. I had no idea. Yeah. And I don't know why I giggled. Yes, I'm just sad about extinction. I mean, that's, but that's, I mean, they're, but they're, they're saving the bats. They're, they're trying to help them. bats so yeah it's not all doom but yeah I mean bats are Halloween so I feel like this isn't

too much of a tangent but yeah like the specific the specific sort of like pollinator thing like there are pollinator plants that are shaped specifically for plants that require pollination that are specifically shaped like for the snouts of nectar bats or specific birds so this is something that is pretty common, but yeah, it's a good strategy except for when your pollinator species goes extinct. Totally. And with these squash, it's not only humans that saved them, but they've really, really benefited from what we think humans did. The sources here are a lot of studies, but especially from 2015 and from 2021 by various Smithsonian teams. And Bruce Smith says that what probably happened is humans initially ate the seeds of wild gourds after washing them

a bunch to make them less bitter and gross, gradually got interested in both planting gourds to make containers and then later planting gourds in new ways to make them less bitter and less gross. Yeah. And without that, it's possible. those squash would have gone extinct and would be just a prehistoric plant. Look, this is a lesson for all the vegetables out there. If you want to survive, you better be tasty. Yeah, that's how humans feel.

And apparently the bitter, weird kind were tasty to these packyderms, essentially. And they were also smaller and a different shape. So we've really developed them into larger and tastier items, especially the Dickinson. Yeah. No, we will take nature's design and make it fun looking and tasty for our own very specific weird human palettes. Yeah. And that helped invent agriculture in Mesoamerica. They applied pumpkin principles to corn and to beans and develop the three sisters method of all them together and applied pumpkin principles to all their other crabs. And then we have like containers to hold stuff like seeds in them. that was helpful. That too.

Yeah. Yeah, you can really grind and min-max the pump-in, you know, build up your character. Like, man, storage space maintenance is really important in any RPG. And we all know this. And life is the biggest RPG. Right. There you are. Yeah.

Folks, thank you for including us in your RPG. That is four takeaways so far. We're going to take a quick break and then come back and see. if we can set us HIFPOD record. We're back, and we have more pumpkin takeaways for you. Takeaway number five. The creation of pumpkin pie, both promoted colonialism and promoted the abolition of slavery. So a really bad thing, I had a really good thing.

I'm like, I'm like tilting my head like a dog trying to hear something. Like, huh, oh, oh, oh. Yeah, basically the simpler version might be that pumpkin pie was fundamental to creating a colonial New England identity, like the Northeast United States. Okay. And so the Northeast was really into seizing and taking things from Native Americans, and it was really into abolishing slavery and the rest of the United States. States. You win some and you lose some? Yeah. I mean, it's it's a good example of when we look at history, it's almost not worth morally judging it. It's just worth exploring what happened because it's really good to that. I'm going to judge a little bit. Of course. Yeah, we do it. But yeah,

I mean, that's interesting because like I thought it was going to be something where it's like pumpkin pie was like invented in the 1950s and we all just think it's really. It's really. It's really old. Oh, yeah, it turns out both pumpkins and pumpkin pie are very old. Like, they date back to the creation of a Thanksgiving holiday and even the feast that was retroactively turned into an inspiration for it. It goes way back. Okay. All right. And key sources here are that book by Rossi Anastopolo called Sweetland of Liberty, A History of America in Eleven Pies, and also writing for Smithsonian Magazine by writer Lorraine Bosenwa. Because previously we established native people started cultivating squash that became pumpkins

11,000 years ago and does food 8,000 years ago. And until the Colombian exchange, the specific squash that we sometimes call pumpkins was exclusively developed by native people. They're why they made that tasty at all. Okay. So this is very like first Thanksgiving type. I'm going to say cultural exchange, even though it's maybe not as nice as that. Yeah, yeah.

It is a staple food for them because the one difference between pumpkin pie and these native practices is that native people made basically every savory food you can make out of pumpkins. I agree with that. The pumpkins are really good and savory stuff. Yeah, apparently they boiled them baked mass. mashed, dried, fried, also use them as flowers for pumpkin breads, and especially for breads made of a combo of corn and pumpkin flour. And this was done across North America, especially in what's now the modern 48 U.S. states. I don't know why pumpkin bread is not more popular than pumpkin pie.

It's excellent. Easier to make, and in my opinion, it tastes better. But, you know, who am I? I'm not queen of the pumpkin committee. some ladies in America basically declared themselves that because yeah we're we're also pretty sure pumpkin was at the 1621 feast in what's now new england that became the basis for myths of american thanksgiving we talked about this on the turkeys episode that turkey was not central to that if it was eaten at all but experts are certain that pumpkin was eaten at that feast you know and in the sense that pumpkins made up. But squashes that we see as pumpkins now were eaten there

because it was a food that was daily for people like that. Yeah, maybe that's why I had the notion that, like, I was going to get tricked by pumpkin pie that it's a lie that they've been in American culture for so long because of the Turkey's thing where the turkey, that being like a iconic first Thanksgiving thing is not true. Yeah, really. Really the only changes that English colonists brought in is to make pumpkins more of a dessert item and to flavor them with spices from the spice trade and especially from Southeast Asia. Like, I don't condone a lot of what the colonists did, but those spices are good. And they were also not available to Native people who were developing these recipes.

Like we talked about on the Cinnamon Show, that's from Southeast Asia and East Asia. So Native Americans didn't have that. I feel like things could have been a lot better if colonists just weren't so murdery. Yep. Because we could have had a fun, a nice cultural exchange without all the murder. So like did they ever consider that is my question, just chilling out a little bit. And those early New England colonists were particularly genocidal. They really focused on it.

And so they did that to people who ate pumpkin because it was eaten everywhere and what's now the U.S., the Haudenosaun, the Mandans in the Great Plains, the Ojibu near the Great Lakes, Cherokee in the southeast, coias and Pueblos in the southwest of what's now the U.S. It was, pumpkin was all over, and partly because it's squash. And there's the, hopefully people have heard on SIF arrangement called Three Sisters, where you have squash and corn and beans growing together and on top of each other. And that's a nice system in terms of keeping the soil from being used up too much, and they're complimentary. Yeah, the beans fix nitrogen back into it, and the beans can climb the corn, and then

the squash have plenty of space below, because I guess I could have said, but I think people know, pumpkins are a low ground vine plants. They're down there. Yes. Yes, they're sitting on the ground, getting tubular. Yeah, or round if they're gross tasting, you know, yeah. Right. And yeah, and then English colonizers immediately just copied every pumpkin learning they could from native farmers.

Apparently later 1600s colonial writers described pumpkins as the number one food that sustained the English colonies. There's a colonial song dated to 1630 with lyrics like, quote, We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon. If it was not for pumpkin, we should be undone. Wow. Like they really lived on pumpkin for a while. So they, like, copied all this stuff from the Native Americans, and then they're like, all right, now that we've learned everything, feeling a little murdery. Yeah, and which fits the broader truths that I think Americans have learned about Thanksgiving, which is that it was a feast in a genocidal time.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And with pumpkins and pumpkin pie type stuff, it was almost specifically a building. a new identity after we killed and pushed out those people kind of thing. Like now that we're English people but in a new place, what's our identity? It can't just be English. Right.

And in particular, there were a lot of colonial cookbooks that made recipes where you swap in pumpkins for apples. Because apples are from West Asia and then spread all over Europe before Europeans invaded the Americas. Yeah, British apples. Yes, especially. So, like, in native traditions that were not a lot of sweet recipes for pumpkin, the one big one was if you had access to maple syrup, because you can tap a maple tree and then sugar up your pumpkin. Oh, yeah. Man, sugared up pumpkin is very good. Yeah. And then as early as 1671, there was an English colonial cookbook with a recipe that just took existing baked apples with spices recipes and copy-pasted pumpkins in instead. There was also one key cookbook writer that cemented all this after the American Revolution.

After the American Revolution, there was even more of a push of, what do we call ourselves as white Americans? Like, what's our deal? What's our culture? And her name was Amelia Simmons. She lived in Albany, New York, and wrote a cookbook called American Cookery. That was a huge hit. It was in print for 35 years. And her explicit goal was to take uniquely English recipes and swap in uniquely, North American ingredients to add up to a new United States cuisine.

So interesting that there was like an actual concerted effort to create an identity around food rather than it just being kind of an organic occurrence. Yeah, yeah. It was only partly natural. It was mostly people saying, I need to know what I describe as American food when I'm making food in America. Right. Like what am I going to do?

Huh. And Simmons basically templated apple pie and pumpkin pie, because she created a recipe for a baked apple pastry, specifically with the top crust, specifically with chopped apples, and specifically with the spices. And then the spices especially became her recipe for a pumpkin pie, where it's basically an English tart type recipe and spice trade spices that they got from other colonies. But with pumpkin filling and the pumpkin filling is what makes sense. American and United States. So she colonized pumpkins. She did it. There may have been apple tarts in England, and there was also like these interesting things

where you just basically like skin an apple, core it, and then wrap it in dough directly and make sort of a ball. Right, right, yeah. But like, I don't think they had the American apple pie. Specific tropes of that lattice crust and everything are. or a little bit of a U.S. invention after the revolution. Right. It's like the same concept, but just kind of made into a more iconic.

That's right. And then Simmons's cookbook and also other people, they proceeded to make pumpkins not just a United States staple, but a northern United States staple, especially in New England, which is right near Albany and New York there. Albany. Sorry. Is that a steamed hams thing?

It's steamed hands. Yeah, yeah. Don't worry about it. Bring in Utica, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, apparently within 25 years, pumpkin pie, especially as templated by Simmons, was the most famous food item of Yankee culture in the northern New United States. So there was a shadowy cabal of people trying to make pumpkin pie the supreme fall dessert. Yeah.

Because, like, I think if it had been merit-based, it would have been pumpkin pie. pumpkin bread. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's specific tastemakers. Like on that on that turkey's show, we talked about a lady named Sarah Josepha Hale, who more or less invented Thanksgiving over like 40 years of agitation and also being a professional magazine publisher who may be popular magazine for ladies. Wow. And as early as the 1820s, she was saying pumpkin pie is foundational to her proposed dinner menu. Her personal agitation led Abraham Lincoln to declare. the first Thanksgiving holiday in 1863. And then that became also part of pushing for the idea that northern and New England culture is better than southern culture. Oh. Partly because they didn't keep slaves so much, you know.

Yeah, I mean, that's fair. That part of it is fair. I'm not going to disagree with that aspect of it. Yeah, and it's basically a thing where coincidentally, people in New York, New England push pumpkin and pumpkin pie more and more and more while they get angry and separate from the South. Right. Because obviously the South seceded, but the North on its own said, yeah, we're not monsters

like you guys. Good. Yeah. Ignore. Ignore the vestiges of the people who we killed who were here. But other than that, we're not monsters. Truly, their premise was killing Indians is fine and holding slaves is terrible. That was their premise.

Yeah. Also, the north has a lot more urbanization than the south. So pumpkins become a symbol of the farming life that northern people both were leaving behind a bed and we're venerating. And according to historian Cindy Ott, quote, the women who helped create Thanksgiving as a holiday were strong abolitionists. So they associated pumpkin farms with northern virtue, with small farming, and very consciously compared it to southern immoral plantation life. Because they didn't grow pumpkins as much on plantations? Yeah, yeah, they had some, but it's slightly better growing conditions, at least in American

farmers' opinions, if it's a little bit colder, a little bit further north, like Illinois-type weather, you know, like where there's a freeze in a deeper way in the winter. Yeah, I learned this about squash when I went to school in Massachusetts, when they would, how, what kind of squash was it? It wasn't quite butternut, but it was some kind of. kind of stringy type of winter squash and there was an initiative by the school to like really start to do locally grown like farm to table stuff for the college and they would like overwhelm us with this stringy squash for every meal and it it did drive me a little bonkers

it made me anti squash for a brief period of time before I came back around. Yeah, and squashes, especially pumpkins, have been sort of culturally political across American history. Like, there's a reason Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War declared the first Thanksgiving holiday. It was to raise our spirits while the Union died fighting the Confederacy. There was also a time in the 1930s when Franklin, Delano Roosevelt changed the date of Thanksgiving, and then it became political for people for or against Roosevelt. Wow. And so really from jump, when Americans started cooking pumpkins as a dessert and as an identity thing, it also became specifically Northern and Yankee in a way that people thought about.

I didn't realize that pumpkins were so political. Yeah, and pumpkin pie specifically is extremely colonial but extremely abolitionist. So there you go. It's all the things that are good and bad about New England. And then you can also carve scary faces onto them. then you can, like, spook plantation owners. Yeah. I do declare, I saw an orange ghoul.

Right, that one main regiment taking little roundtop at the Battle of Gettysburg because of their scary jackal lanterns that the rebels couldn't handle. Because, like, with the legend of Sleepy Hollow, there's the headless horseman, but he has, like, a pumpkin head, right? Am I imagining that? All this is a perfect segue for the last takeaway of the movie. main show, which I believe is record setting for SIF, takeaway number six. Pumpkins were the final step in the creation of modern jack-o-lanterns.

There was actually a long tradition of especially Scottish and Irish and Gaelic Europeans carving vegetables and putting lights inside them. And then the last step was that some of those people, they or their descendants moved to North America and got into Halloween. And so they swapped in pumpkins. Yeah, I mean, pumpkins are pretty, pretty ideal for making jack-o-lanterns, I got to say. They really are. When I was reading this, they said that the big culinary vegetable or vegetable before that was turnips.

I don't think turnips are as good for this at all. Can you hollow out a turn-up, though, and, like, put a candle inside? Because that seems, I'm looking up, a turn-up jack-o-lantern. It doesn't seem. I don't like that No that's awful I hate that I don't like it It looks really bad and scary

I don't like it no thank you It really does look like a demon baby head That's been mummified I and I yeah No I'm gonna say no I'm gonna say big no I don't like it I don't like this thing looking at me I did look at the just a brief description of the

Headless Horse the Legend of Sleepy Hollow with Iqabod Crane and headless horsemen. I was incorrect in saying he had a pumpkin head. It was that he was headless, and Iqabod Crane thinks he throws a severed head at him. But then the next day, people see like a shattered pumpkin. And so the ideas in the story is that this guy, who's kind of a bully, but I guess we root for him.

I don't know, because Iqabod Crane sucks. I always felt a little sorry for the guy. Yeah, and that all fits colonial Americans being pumpkin-centric. Even Sleepy Hollow is a place you can go in New York, it's down the river from Albany, where cookbook writers are finishing the colonization of pumpkins, you know. And the practice of Jackal Lanterns happens before anybody had pumpkins to do it. Key sources here are History.com and also the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. A natural history museum talks about this because it involves the Colombian Exchange.

where various vegetables and plants grow. If folks have heard our past Halloween costumes or Halloween stores episodes, we talk about vague trends just kind of adding up to Halloween in the United States. And one of them is Jacko Lanterns, which come from Irish and Scottish people, especially with Gaelic traditions. And there's a few things that vaguely added up there. One is a holiday called Salin with rituals of people going from house to house

in search of food and drink. Right. Another trend is marsh gas. There's a biological and chemical phenomenon called Ignis Fattus or False Fire. Yeah, like the Will of the Whisp thing, right? It's like that, yeah, like methane and bogs and marshes and stuff spontaneously ignites. And there's either little flames or stuff that looks like flames in weird, boggy areas, such as Scotland and Ireland. And people thought these were like spirits?

Yeah, and then it had a haunted and spirited vibe, yeah. Fun. And then the most specific trend that led to Jackal Lanterns is a legend. It's a legend about a man named Stingy Jack. Ah, good old Stingy Jack. I wonder what is sort of how his finances were. Yeah, so he might have been poor, but either way, he was cheap. And the legend is all about Stingy Jack playing a trick or a series of tricks on the devil

to force the devil to pay for stuff instead of Jack. Nice. Which is cool. That's a good move. Yeah. And then the ending of it is, it reminds me of the Flying Dutchman. Basically, Stingy Jack dies. God won't let him into heaven because he's a trickster.

The devil won't let him in because he keeps bilking the devil out of money. And so the devil says you can't be in heaven or hell. You have to wander the earth with only a burning coal to light your way. And then Jack puts that inside a carved-out vegetable. I like that this one was just like he's too much of a liar you lied too much you trick you you're too much of a grifter you've got to wander the earth forever for being a grifter

really like the most common story involves stingy jack tricking the devil into paying for drinks at a bar you know like such grift seems a little harsh to make to torture someone forever yeah for that reason And in some versions, the devil gets imprisoned in Jack's pocket. Like, it's kind of, like, I can see why the devil's mad, but also still let him into hell, you know? Hell's not great. Yeah.

No, I mean. It's not like you're doing him a favor. Sure. But then Satan's got to hang out with him. So I kind of get it, like, Satan's like, I don't want to hang out with this guy. Right. Like, his fear in the story as the devil is that Jack will keep taking his money through various tricks in hell. Right?

Like, that's great. That's a really good bit. So anyway, the upshot of the legend is that he becomes a wandering guy named Jack with a lantern. So Jack of the Lantern becomes Jack O'Lanturn, you know? Oh, right. That's a fun name, origin. Because O with an apostrophe stands for Ove. Right, yeah, in Gaelic languages.

Yeah, it does. And so that leads to practices where people celebrate this story by putting candles or little hot coals into turnips or potatoes or other just salad produce. Anyone ever try it with a carrot? I think carrots are just not wide enough, but there were probably attempts if you had a weird carrot, yeah. I'm going to try it. And apparently some English people did it with beets, but anyway, these English,

Scottish, Irish people made their way to invading North America and saw squash and pumpkins. And they were like, oh my gosh, great. Their jaws just like dropped open like a Looney Tunes wolf and they're like a wuga, that is, that's a big round vegetable where I could put some candles in there. And then they carve a pumpkin so its face can say a wuga. You know, like, give me a second. And they do it really fast. Yeah. So, yeah, so the pumpkins were the last step.

Like they invaded the continent with the entire practice ready to go. And pumpkins were a new raw material. yeah i mean pumpkins are pretty pretty choice because like you can sit them like they have a flat enough bottom where you can just like sit them down right because like other gourds or squash might be a little harder to sort of sit sit down they're round you can carve out a nice hollow area for the candle yeah they're perfect yeah and definitely don't look like some kind of taxidermy demon baby head So that's a big plus in my mind. God, the turnip ones.

The turnips are awful, yeah. I hate it. I mean, if you're looking for like a more like actually scary thing for Halloween, those are for sure actually upsetting. Yeah. Our household made a decor decision consciously of we're going to do cute ghosts, not horror. And if you're the horror type, this is for you, you know. Yeah.

I used to, when I was a little kid, I was such a weenie. I would get really upset at the nasty Halloween decorations. Me too. It's really bloody and weird. Yeah, I don't like it. I remember particularly, we went to like a costume store and there was like a one of these rubber decorations. It was like a guy like in manacles hanging from the ceiling.

And he was just like, his entire lower section was just like gone. and he had like intestine sticking out in his torso. And I just like, that freaked me out a lot. Yeah, it's really scary. I was like, I was like nine or something. And it's there's such a proliferation of all those like kind of scary looking things. Like do kids even care anymore or did minecrafts make them strong? I feel like that's one of those things where we wonder if other.

generations are different, and then they're exactly the same as us. Like, some of them are really scared of it, and some of them love it, and they're just like us. Right. If you're a child, write to us, let us know, is it spooky? Is Halloween too spooky? If a few of your letters are not backwards, such as ours or E's, I'll know you're not a child, so you have to do that. It better be written in crayon somehow in the email. Thank you, yeah.

Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, biologically, pumpkins are more of a concept than a species. Takeaway number two, modern pumpkin spice flavor is not made of pumpkins or made of real spices. Takeaway number three, you've probably never seen the kind of pumpkins you eat. Canned and puread pumpkin is made of a tan oblong pumpkin called the Dickinson. Takeaway number four, early humans helped prevent the extinction of the squash that became pumpkins

by cultivating those squash as storage containers. And another amazing thing in that takeaway, pumpkins were the beginning of agriculture in Mesoamerica. Takeaway number five, the creation of pumpkin pie, both promoted colonialism and promoted the abolition of slavery by being a Yankee New England Union thing. And finally, takeaway number six, pumpkins were the final step in the creation of modern jacko lanterns. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show.

Every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is three amazing stories about smashing pumpkins. Visit sifpod.com. that bonus show for a library of more than 22 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources include two wonderful books. One of them is the complete squash, a passionate grower's guide to pumpkins, squashes, and

Gordes. That's by gardening expert Amy Goldman. Another book called Sweet Land of Liberty, A History of America, and Eleven Pies, by award-winning food writer Rossi and Estoppelow. A lot of digital resources from universities, especially the University of Illinois and Iowa State University, and the USDA National Plant Germplasm System. The USDA National Plant Germplasm System works with universities, leaned on a YouTube video from Kathy Reitzma, who's at their Ames, Iowa Station. And then beyond those, lots of wonderful journalism about pumpkins, such as NPR's The Salt Food Blog, a piece there by Dan Charles, a report for NPR weekend edition by host Sam Simon, interviewing pumpkin farmer Mack Condill in Arthur, Illinois, and then

tremendous journalism and archaeobotany from the Smithsonian, and studies by Smithsonian teams in 2015 and 2021. That page also features resources such as native-dashland.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still

here, especially with a topic like this. I hope we highlighted the centrality of native people. And hey, join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.

This week's pick is episode 260. that's about the topic of the color red. Fun fact there, sports cars are often red thanks to one specific car from Italy and one race across Asia and Europe. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature

about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Buddos band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?

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