Meet the culinary star of autumn

(It's an interview with a pumpkin.)

Fall started this past weekend in the Northern Hemisphere, and even if the weather outside isn’t exactly autumnal yet where you are, there still signs of the seasons’ turnover to be found. In fact, one need look no further than the shelves of their local grocery store, where a cornocupia of pumpkin-tinged products has materialized.

Yes, friends—it’s Pumpkin Season.

From coffee and beer to cereal and candy, there’s nary a food product one can imagine that doesn’t receive the pumpkin treatment this time of year. It’s hardly a new trend—in fact, we’re more than two decades into its evolution—but there’s little sign of it fading away any time soon.

Countless barrels of proverbial ink have been spilled discussing (and sometimes decrying) this cultural phenomenon, but those conversations only ever seem to scratch the surface.

Here at The Action Cookbook Newsletter, we demand better.

That’s why today we’re interviewing someone with real insight into the matter:

A pumpkin.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I know this is a very busy time of year for you.

It’s my pleasure.

As I noted in the preface above, the last two decades have seen a tremendous surge in the popularity and diversity of pumpkin-themed foodstuffs. It’s to the point where you simply can’t walk through a grocery store between Labor Day and Thanksgiving without being overwhelmed by orange. It’s a lot for anyone to process, but I’m sure even more so for you.

Has this been a positive development for you?

I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up. I couldn’t hear you over my money.

I’ll take that as a yes, then.

Yes, of course it’s been good for me. But there’s an underlying presumption in your question that I’d like to push back on, and that’s the notion that this change was a matter of happenstance. Make no mistake—this was no accident; this was our dream.

You’re saying that pumpkins wanted to take over the world?

My boy, everyone wants to take over the world! Pumpkins just got out there and made it happen for ourselves.

It’s easy to delude oneself into thinking that tastes are capricious, inexplicable or random—that our preferences and desires simply materialize out of the ether.

The reality is, that couldn’t be further from the truth—tastes are made, and when push came to shove, pumpkind muscled our way into your hearts, minds and pantries.

I had no idea that produce was capable organized action like this.

Oh, we all do it—we just don’t all do it well.

It’s a matter of seeing an opportunity and seizing it, you know? Kale spent decades hanging on as decoration on Pizza Hut salad bars. Their shift to star ingredient in gross smoothies that you feel virtuous drinking was the product of an absolutely heroic struggle.

Same for cauliflower, but heading in the opposite direction—they hopped off the crudite plate and right into pizza crust. Just like kale, they saw an opening and they took it, and they’re both better off for it.

I’m fascinated to learn this.

Of course, not everyone could pull off such a dramatic rebranding effort.

You probably don’t know about celery’s push to be the flavor of New Year’s, do you?

I’m sorry, what?

“Celer-bration”, they were going to call it. There was a whole pitch deck that circulated a few years ago. The idea went, instead of having a champagne toast at midnight, you could drink a flute of celery soda to kick off Dry January.

That’s a terrible idea.

Well, celery is terrible. It’s water that gets stuck in your teeth.

You can’t fault them for trying, of course—I mean, look at cauliflower—but the whole thing was ill-conceived. They paid that consulting firm so much money, too.

Real shame.

Let’s get back to your rise, though. It’s not like pumpkins were struggling before the 21st-century gimmick food industry developed. Jack O’ Lanterns are the iconic symbol of Halloween, and if you ask me, no Thanksgiving table is complete without a fresly-baked pumpkin pie on top of it.

What precipitated your push into autumnal dominance?

You have to innovate or die.

That sounds like a Silicon Valley start-up cliche, but it’s true. Again, look at celery—they were hanging in there. They had mirepoix. Buffalo wings. Ants on a log. They weren’t out of the picture at all.

Getty Images / pamela_d_mcadams

Ah, man, I haven’t had ants on a log in years. I loved that when I was kid.

See, that’s the problem. Most people haven’t had it in years, and with greater consciousness of peanut allergies in schools. it’s one that risks fading into the dustbin of history.

If the price of wings keeps going up? Well, then they’re boned.

You have to seek out new markets if you want to survive, and that’s why all of us in the pumpkin patch got together and made this push.

Let’s talk about some of those markets. Obviously, a seminal moment for you was the 2003 debut of Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte.

Absolutely huge for us. No one thought we could break into the breakfast market, and certainly not as a beverage.

But you’ve also got pumpkin beer.

Delicious hot or cold.

Pumpkin pancakes.

Who doesn’t love pancakes?

Pumpkin protein powder.

We love gains. One of my cousins got to be two thousand pounds.

There’s Pumpkin Pop-Tarts, pumpkin pasta sauce, pumpkin cream cheese, pumpkin dog treats… the list goes on.

If you go into a Trader Joe’s between August and October, they won’t sell you food without pumpkin in it. They’ll kick you out of the store if you even ask. That’s very lucrative for us—we capture the market of people who think emptying a bag into a pan is “cooking”.

On that note, I see that this year Trader Joe’s has, somewhat controversially, rolled out a Pumpkin Spice Chardonnay.

I’m gonna be real with you: we did that deal just to make grapes mad. They’ve been the pretty boy of the produce section for too damn long, and so we thought it would knock them down a peg.

It’s truly remarkable the reach that pumpkin-themed products have developed. But we haven’t addressed the elephant in the room.

And that is?

The fact is, many of these items contain no pumpkin flavor at all.

Ah, yes. You’re addressing the fact that “pumpkin spice” isn’t the flavor of pumpkins, but rather a spice blend complementary to our flavor that generally consists of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, cloves.

Getty Images / Enrique Diaz

Doesn’t that offend you?

Heavens, no—we worked hard to pull that deal off.

It’s an exercise in mutually-beneficial branding. We get into culinary corners we wouldn’t otherwise come near, and they get a pretty face to represent them. Cloves needed that deal bad, too. English majors had been keeping them afloat for decades, but when clove cigarettes were banned in the US, they nearly went bankrupt.

We saved them from the abyss.

Do you ever find yourself nostalgic for the old days—before the lattes, the beers, the Oreos and the rest? Do you ever wish you could just go back to Jack O’ Lanterns and pie?

Not at all. People may tire of our omnipresence this time of year. They might turn their nose up at some of the odder places we turn up. I don’t fault them for that.

I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, though.

Did you know that the original Jack O’Lanterns were made not from pumpkins, but from turnips? We took that from them years ago, and now many people will go their entire lives without ever buying a single turnip.

I don’t feel remorse over that; we did what we had to do.

But every pumpkin-spice yogurt, pumpkin cold-foam-in-a-can or frozen pumpkin macaroni and cheese sold is a reminder that we’re not going out like they did.

That’s a perspective I hadn’t considered.

Oh, and Billy Corgan can go to hell. Put that in your newspaper or whatever.

Thank you for taking the time to talk with us today; it’s been enlightening. This is a bit embarrassing, though—I just realized I never got your name.

Curcubita pepo is my formal name. But my friends just call me Gord.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

Postscript: I would be remiss if I did not re-share the recipe I developed several years ago for “Pumpkin Spice Pork”, something I absolutely did as a joke and a dish that turned out legitimately delicious in spite of that genesis.