Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) Paperback – July 23, 2013

I guess this was about what I expected. The trouble is, it's a short book that is still twice as long as it needs to be. And half of the book is footnotes. It seemed to run over the same ground quite a bit (e.g.: stressing, through the years, the pumpkin's popular connection to America's agrarian past) and I found myself glazing over the most trivial parts of it. But it did leave me feeling like more of an expert on pumpkins in it's repetition. I'll never look at a pumpkin quite the same way. I'm not sorry I read it, just that it was rather overpriced for what it is.

Very interesting read on history of the pumpkin in America and how it has become tied to Halloween and Thanksgiving!

A Christmas present all tucked away!

Beautifully written book on the history of pumpkins. I had no idea how fascinating pumpkins could be! I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in America culture.

This book is heftier than I thought it would be, but that's a good thing! It's a beautiful orange cover, letting you know this book is about PUMPKINS and nothing else. The inside flap gives some insight into what it's about ("why people travel miles to get this food they'll unlikely eat..."). And the table of contents is split into just a couple of chapters ranging from traditions pumpkins are used in to what a pumpkin actually IS. Cant wait to start reading!

This is a Weyerhaeuser Environmental Book, which has a lot of prestige. It is a difficult book to describe; it reads as if Ott turned her doctoral dissertation into a book. Some portions sparkle and some are monograph-dull. I am not sure why it is considered environmental, unless the human rural environment is the reason Weyerhaeuser (a major timber producer) added it to the series.

The cultural history of common items can offer insight into culture, which is why, I would guess, most people would read this book. It includes some history of pumpkins, but mostly it is concerned with American social history, a combination of food, farming, icons and such. She describes pumpkins as traditionally food for the poor, and the pumpkin went into decline as the 1800s progressed. The pumpkin has been resurrected so to speak, by Halloween and Thanksgiving, as material for pies and objects symbolizing fall.

Much of the book is concerned with how the holidays changed the status of pumpkins to make it more positive, including how pumpkins help keep a number of small farms afloat. She discusses particular canning firms, and how canned pumpkins became available and then commonly used for pie filling. It is less history of the pumpkin as a food than as the pumpkin as a symbol of things rural and the rural fall--social nostalgia, really. The book could be shorter but as is, it's not long--just that the slow parts make it seem longer. Four stars rather than three because of the offbeat subject. It is more personal that all this might seem, and yes, the book also discusses pie.

Normally, I enjoy books on the histories of our foodstuffs. This one, however, I didn't particularly enjoy. Much of the writing is pedantic, tedious and repetitive and I believe the author overstates her case, as almost every chapter reiterates her belief that the pumpkin symbolizes America's "lost" agrarian past and Thomas Jefferson's "nation of yeoman farmers" ideal. But, I must admit, that after I finished the book, I made a pumpkin pie. And for those that think of pumpkin pie as bland, use more cinnamon, ginger and cloves than what the recipes generally call for.

I also was disturbed when the author referred to the opossum as a rodent. Opossums are marsupials -- pouched mammals like kangaroos, not rodents -- which are placental mammals. Am not sure whether the author or the editor needs to bone up on their vertebrate zoology, but glaring errors like this make one wonder what other misconceptions may have crept into a book.

An illustrated version of this review appears on my blog: [...]

I am not a big fan of pumpkin pie. The bland flavor and gummy texture is quite unappealing to me, and I just don’t get this whole pumpkin-flavored latte, ice cream, and yogurt craze.  But I am a huge fan of Cindy Ott’s new book, Pumpkin: The Curious History of An American Icon.  Before opening its pages, I had no burning desire to learn about the history of this native, oversized squash.  But once I began reading I could not put it down.  Over the last decade or so, I have been thinking, reading, and writing about the American history of a non-native fruit–the apple–carried to the Americas by European invaders.  While I’ve been pondering the impact of the apple on North America, its role in the expansion of the Euro-American societies who brought it here, and its adoption by indigenous peoples, Cindy Ott has been writing about the story of the native pumpkin, its use by these invaders, and how it ultimately emerged as a symbol prized more for its cultural than its economic value.

While Americans today distinguish the bright round orange pumpkin from other varieties of squash, the two are in fact genetically identical and can cross-pollinate.  For Native peoples of eastern North America, squash was one of the “three sisters,” along with corn and beans, which were the core of Native American agriculture.  The three food crops were complementary both ecologically and nutritionally.  Squash were easy to grow in abundance, and “could be preserved over the winter, when other food items were scarce.”  Europeans came to the Americas with a certain finickiness born of a sense of cultural superiority, and did not immediately embrace the pumpkin.  But they brought the seeds back across the Atlantic and within a few decades of Columbus’ first voyage, New World pumpkins had spread across Europe, where they were regarded with a mix of fascination and disdain.  ”As a sign of human nature,” Ott informs her readers, “the pumpkin embodied unbounded lust or lack of civility; as a symbol of a place, it represented the untamed natural bounties of North America; and as an emblem of  a way of life, it stood for a rustic peasant existence.”  But mostly they saw the pumpkin as food for the poor, and for those barely civilized Europeans who had migrated to the New World.  New England’s religious dissenters soon came to appreciate its value, especially in lean times.  The pumpkin became for poor farmers short on labor something like the untended seedling apple tree–a useful food plant which would bring forth a bounty even when neglected.  But for the wealthy and the refined, the pumpkin was a symbol of the lowly and uncivilized.

For several hundred years, farmers grew pumpkins to supplement their families’ diet, but they had virtually no commercial value. As advances in transportation technology in the early 19th century drew most American farmers into a market economy, the pumpkin became a symbol of the pre-market, rustic, self-provisioning past. At first this reputation was a liability, but eventually as nostalgia for simpler times grew, the pumpkin’s value as a symbol of those simpler times also increased. Ott concludes that it is not a coincidence that the same Yankee poets and writers who began to celebrate the pumpkin–John Greenleaf Whittier, Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Maria Child, and others–also were active in the antislavery movement which championed the moral superiority of the New England family farm tradition over the exploitative plantation system of the South. The pumpkin had become a symbol of those Yankee values.

After the Civil War, American agriculture became thoroughly commercial, and farmers specialized, producing for national markets. There was no room for the pumpkin in this new agriculture, which had limited market appeal and in an age of mechanization could still only be harvested by hand. The late 19th century pumpkin was “one of the least profitable and palatable of vegetables,” but ironically, its value as a symbol of the agrarian lifestyle continued to grow. Images of pumpkins featured prominently in agricultural periodicals and became central attractions at agricultural affairs, eventually leading to contests to grow mammoth-sized pumpkins. By the dawn of the twentieth century, “American prized the pumpkin for its looks and its meanings, not its meat.”

Across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the pumpkin’s appeal–in the form of jack-o-lanterns and the pumpkin pie–continued to grow.  And today urban and suburban Americans venture into the countryside to select pumpkins as decorations, in an effort to connect themselves with a vanishing agrarian past.

There is so much more in this book than this brief and overly simplified description can provide. Ott will make you consider Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage in a new light, and get you thinking about the strange origins of nursery rhyme character Peter Pumpkin Eater, who solved the problem of a wayward wife by putting her in a pumpkin shell.  Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon is a rich and multilayered cultural, environmental, agricultural, and economic history, offering astounding insights on nearly every page. Highly recommended for pumpkin-eaters and non-pumpkin-eaters alike.

For more information, check out the book’s website, [...]

This review first appeared on my blog: [...]