This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Smashing Pumpkin Myths: What’s Big, Orange, and Having an Identity Crisis?, first released on September 19, 2024. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

BROADCASTER: Okay, this almost sounds like a setup for a joke. Why did this Harvard student get in a giant pumpkin and row down the Charles River?

REPORTER: A giant pumpkin floating down the Charles River. The man inside guiding it is a Harvard University senior. Benjamin Chang says it has been a longtime dream of his to row a pumpkin across the Charles River. And that dream finally came true yesterday in front of cheering friends.

CYNTHIA GRABER: I have crossed the Charles River in Boston more times than I could possibly count: usually on the subway, occasionally on a bike or in a car—never in a giant pumpkin.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Yes, the official start of autumn is only a few days away, and while everyone else is satisfied with a few decorative gourds, Cynthia and I now want a giant pumpkin boat.

GRABER: And since we can’t have that, maybe a Gastropod episode on pumpkins? And we are indeed Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, I’m Cynthia Graber—

TWILLEY: And I’m Nicola Twilley. And this episode is all about pumpkins! Or should I say squash! Or both? Or is there actually even a difference?

GRABER: That is something we will definitely figure out this episode. Plus, why is squash for dinner but pumpkin is for dessert, in the form of a pie? And why do Americans all eat pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving?

TWILLEY: Plus how do you grow a vegetable so big it can actually become a boat? Are pumpkin-roids involved?

GRABER: All that, and why you call a cute little kid a pumpkin, but if you want to insult someone, you might call them a pumpkinhead.

TWILLEY: I actually never realized that was an insult and I’m rethinking some things right now. Anyway, this episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

LORI SHAPIRO: Thank you for doing this episode. This is the episode I’ve been waiting for since you started doing Gastropod.

GRABER: Lori Shapiro is a Gastropod fan who’s been listening since the beginning. She used to be a research scientist studying wild and cultivated cucurbits, which is the scientific name for the squash family, and now she has a very cool chocolate company called Sueños. But she still loves the squash.

SHAPIRO: I think that Cucurbita, especially the ones domesticated in Central America and the United States, are the most underappreciated plants. Easily the most interesting plants in the world, and have a much longer and more intimate association with humans and cultivation, and in the wild, than we think about now.

TWILLEY: The most interesting plant in the world is a bold claim! You’ll have to decide yourself at the end of the episode. But the long association with humans, that is scientifically proven.

CINDY OTT: So pumpkin and squash, the Cucurbita family is actually one of the oldest domesticated plants in the Americas. So it comes from 10,000 B.C., the Oaxaca area, like a lot of these, the first center of agriculture in the Americas. Older, though, than corn and older than beans.

GRABER: Cindy Ott is a history professor at the University of Delaware and the author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon. She says the oldest domesticated seeds were found in a cave in Mexico, in the highlands of Oaxaca.

TWILLEY: And the story of how these pumpkins and squashes were domesticated—that’s something that’s being teased out at another cave site, this one’s in Honduras and it’s called El Gigante.

ALEJANDRA DOMIC: In this case, we have been very lucky because this site has, like, thousands of plant remains that have been well preserved.

GRABER: Alejandra Domic is a botanist and a paleoecologist at Penn State University, and she’s been studying the pumpkin and squash seeds found at El Gigante.

DOMIC: So, it’s one of the very few rock shelters in Mesoamerica in general that has this really good preservation of plant remains. But also with something that’s really cool, too, is that it has this very long human occupation. We now know that the first humans arrived to El Gigante rock shelter about, like, almost 11,000 years ago.

GRABER: Alejandra didn’t excavate the site herself, but she’s been working on the sediment that was collected there.

DOMIC: And then I was sorting out through all the sediment and we started noticing that there was all these small pieces of like, a squash rind. So, it was real interesting because until then, we knew when domesticated squash arrived to the area. But when I started sorting out this sediment, we started finding out a lot of very young, potentially like, wilder squash.

TWILLEY: You or I might be hard pushed to tell the difference between a wild squash and a tame one, but paleoecologists have their techniques.

DOMIC: We know that there’s some differences we could tell with the work that we have done, there’s a difference in wild, like squash rinds to like, domesticated rinds. Because especially like wild rinds are very thin. And then like the domesticated rind squashes, they’re quite thick.

GRABER: Alejandra and Lori both told us that these early wild squashes were small and round, maybe like the size of a baseball, and they were really useful to folks in Central and South America.

DOMIC: I think like, probably it was a combination of multiple things. Probably they ate the seeds, and also they use these, containers, like the squash containers to store food. Or also to store water.

SHAPIRO: They have these, these hard rinds that lignify once they’re dry.

TWILLEY: Lignify meaning literally turn into wood.

SHAPIRO: And so they’re just incredibly useful. Before there were ceramics, you could use them as, as vessels. You could carry things around in them. They also were good floats for fishing nets. So people were likely using them in a utilitarian way before they started eating them.

TWILLEY: The seeds are of course a tasty snack, and in an era before plastic buckets, it’s quite ingenious to use a squash to carry water. But why not eat the orange flesh, too?

DOMIC: Because they have a lot of content of cucurbitacin, which is basically something that a wild squashes produced to avoid being eaten.

SHAPIRO: And these are the most bitter compounds ever described. They’re incredibly toxic. If you were to try and taste a wild gourd, you would spit it out immediately. It’s awful. And if you happen to eat it, you would get very sick.

TWILLEY: It wasn’t until the squash was domesticated that the flesh became edible. And that took a little while longer.

GRABER: Alejandra told us that people came back to the cave four thousand years ago, and this time they brought some sweet, domesticated squash with them.

TWILLEY: It turns out, that compound that makes the flesh of wild squash so bitter, there’s just a couple of genes responsible for making it. And so it’s not so surprising to imagine how a non-bitter mutant could have emerged, just naturally, and then people noticed and liked it.

GRABER: This story that we’re telling about how squash were domesticated, this actually happened a number of times in the Americas, because there are a bunch of different species of related plants, all squashes.

TWILLEY: At El Gigante, Alejandra told us she found a variety called Cucurbita pepo, which is the oldest domesticated squash, the one that’s likely from Oaxaca and that predates domesticated corn and beans. Acorn squash, zucchinis, summer squash, orange pumpkins, they’re all Cucurbita pepo. But butternut squash is a cucurbita called Cucurbita moschata.

GRABER: But wait there’s more. The moschata is from northern South America, and so is a species called Cucurbita maxima, and that was domesticated too, some examples of these are what we’d now know of as the hubbard squash, or the kabocha, which I love.

SHAPIRO: The Cucurbita maxima varieties that were originally domesticated in South America are the richest, sweetest, densest flesh.

TWILLEY: All of these different species—C. pepo, C. maxima, C. moschata, and a handful more—the names sound complicated but they’re all basically squashes at the end of the day. And they were all super popular, all over the Americas, because they were useful, but also because they were really low maintenance.

OTT: The most important takeaway message about them is that they’re prolific. They grow like a weed. And they can store well too.

DOMIC: They can tolerate different climates, like as people started moving the squashes around and then introducing them to new environments, like Eastern United States. Like somehow squashes were able to adapt to these new conditions. So probably that was some of the things that make them easy to cultivate. And also, they’re also yummy. And they can be very nutritious as well because they have a high content of vitamin C.

SHAPIRO: The whole plant is edible. So you’ll have squash leaves, you’ll have the immature fruit, you’ll eat the flowers.

GRABER: And of course the seeds—that’s what we were originally eating from the super bitter wild squash. The seeds from domesticated squash were still edible and they were bigger, and people ate them as snacks, and they used them for their oil, and turned them into delicious sauces, too. Like mole, which we’ve done an entire episode on.

TWILLEY: Not to sound like we’re on the payroll of Big Pumpkin here, but not only do squashes grow like weeds and have all these uses et cetera, they are also the perfect companions for the two other big guns of American agriculture:, corn and beans.

SHAPIRO: So the, the squash, beans, and maize complex have been a basis of the Mesoamerican and Eastern North American diets since the plants were domesticated.

GRABER: This is called a Three Sisters planting. The beans fix nitrogen. The corn provides both shade and structure for the beans and the squash, and the squash shades the ground to keep moisture in the soil and prevent weeds from growing.

SHAPIRO: So when the Europeans arrived, they would have found that it was very important. It was a key part of the agricultural systems.

OTT: And because of the importance, then, a lot of native communities had wonderful ceremonies surrounding them. There’s old images that you’ll see of someone—you can tell they’re of high status because they’re surrounded by these different types of squash. Because of their size too, they, you know, people paid attention to them too, that they were special because they could, you know, they’re starting to grow to be some of the biggest domesticated crops, you know, in the Americas. So that gave people that could grow them and produce them high status as well.

TWILLEY: So far, so beautiful. But I am afraid I need to raise a little niggle. We’ve been throwing around the words squash and pumpkin like they’re interchangeable. So what’s actually the difference between a pumpkin and a squash?

SHAPIRO: It’s whatever you want it to be. [LAUGH]

GRABER: Thanks, Lori, that’s super helpful. Adam Alexander had a definition that was nearly as helpful.

ADAM ALEXANDER: All pumpkins are a type of squash, but not all squash are pumpkins.

TWILLEY: There you have it. Adam Alexander is a veteran grower of squash slash pumpkins and the author of The Seed Detective: Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables. And what he means with that cryptic statement is that what we call pumpkins today are a variety of Cucurbita pepo, which are squashes. But as we know there are lots of other Cucurbitas—other pepos, as well as all the maximas and moschatas—and we don’t call them pumpkins.

GRABER: This whole issue of what was a squash, and what was a pumpkin, it wasn’t an issue at all before Europeans showed up. Each indigenous community had its own words for these plants, and they had different names for different varieties they’d bred. But the general word squash comes from a people who lived in northern North America, and would have been among the first indigenous groups that Europeans met.

ALEXANDER: The Algonquin word for the fruit that we call squash is ascoot asquash. That was then taken on by the Brits, who then called it squash. But they also had another word which was pompeon, which came through from a French use of the word.

TWILLEY: Squash were American, they were new to the colonizers, but squash have relatives all round the world: bottle gourds in Africa but also melons and cucumbers from Asia.

GRABER: And in Europe, the term pompion or also the related word pepo was used to refer to things like those melons and cucumbers, it came from a word meaning to ripen in the sun. Our good friend Pliny the Elder—

TWILLEY: He’s been on the show before! Not literally.

GRABER: He said that when the cucumber acquires a very considerable size, it is known as a pepo.

TWILLEY: So when Europeans encountered these new American gourd things that also ripened and rounded in the sun, they were like, oh hey, it’s a pompeon. Or pumpkin.

GRABER: The thing is, those large melon-like things that ripened in the sun, they didn’t have to be orange to be called a pompeon back then. And no matter what color they were, they were a critical part of the European diet in the New World.

OTT: Well, they became acquainted with them, because they had to not because they wanted to. So when a lot of Europeans came early on, they wanted to be able to produce their food. We all like our comfort foods and the ones that we’re familiar with, and that’s what they wanted to try to produce, but they couldn’t at first. But they relied on native communities to provide them with foods before they could grow them themselves.

TWILLEY: Europeans used squash the same way native Americans often did, cooked down into a stew—one that handily came with its own pot.

ALEXANDER: Because you know, you needed to cook something, you were on the trail all day, you wanted to put something into you wanted to make a dish which you could cook overnight, you know, you’d make a hole in the ground, you’d have a big squash, you’d scoop it out, you’d put stuff in it.

GRABER: But they also used it as a substitute for other ingredients they missed from home like barley and wheat, because it was really sweet but also really starchy—

OTT: So they made vinegar out of it, they made beer out of it, they made bread out of it. All these kinds of—their, their foods, they would use the pumpkin.

TWILLEY: But it wasn’t the settlers’ first choice. Once they actually figured out how to grow wheat and all their other traditional European crops, they basically ghosted pumpkins.

OTT: And then it would be really associated with people that were having a hard time making a living off the land or living like, on the edge.

GRABER: The early settlers were so kind of dismissive of pumpkins—I mean, they’d eat them when they had to, which was quite frequently, but whatever. So there’s no obvious mention of them at the meal that we think of as the first Thanksgiving. William Bradford—he was the governor of the Plymouth colony in what’s now Massachusetts for 30 years—he wrote the most detailed description of what was eaten then back in 1621, and he mentioned a melon, which maybe was a squash?

OTT: But the point is that they were probably eaten the day before and the day after too. It was just a part of daily sustenance that you would have for any kind of meal at that time of year. So of course it was not in a celebratory, end part of the meal.

TWILLEY: So how did this not super special, not super desirable cut rate melon become the all-American pumpkin, star of the Thanksgiving dessert bonanza? That story, coming up after the break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: The very first cookbook to be written and published in America was by a woman named Amelia Simmons, and it came out in 1796.

TWILLEY: For those of you who are as ignorant of American history as I was after going to school in the UK: something quite important had happened just a couple decades earlier, in 1776.

GRABER: That would be the year, Nicky, that we ditched your royalty and became a fully independent country.

TWILLEY: A decision that had big implications for the pumpkin-squash dichotomy.

OTT: So the very first cookbook, Amelia Simmons’ cookbook, that’s sort of the first national cookbook where you see that the squash is in the vegetable category. And the pumpkin starts showing up in the dessert.

GRABER: In fact, pumpkin showed up in the dessert section with a recipe for pumpkin pie.

OTT: All of a sudden, it’s a pie. There’s a lot of cream, a lot of butter. So that’s when it starts to really become, when it just turned into a dessert.

TWILLEY: Whereas Amelia’s squash recipe was a good old-fashioned savory stew.

GRABER: Nobody seems to know why this happened, why exactly pumpkin became the cool dessert version of the squash, it might be because it was bigger, things were called pompion if they were grander, who knows.

TWILLEY: But the point is, pumpkin started to be more than just a squash. It had symbolism. It started to represent something important about how Americans wanted to see themselves.

GRABER: And this mattered for a couple of reasons. First, Americans were trying to establish a national identity, to separate themselves from the Brits. But also we were literally changing how we were living.

OTT: So people are moving into the cities. But then, at the same time, people are sounding- kind of getting nostalgic. They’re, they’re a little stressed about losing those connections to nature. So then they start to be nostalgic. And so the pumpkin then becomes something that’s seen as very positive associations of the small family farm. The ideas that it represents, those agrarian ideas about like, toiling in the soil, and virtuous work that leads to good citizens.

TWILLEY: Pumpkins, remember, had always been beloved for being so low maintenance and high yield. And to a generation of Americans that was trying to see itself as different from the Old World, those qualities meant that pumpkins were the key to self-sufficiency, and to the idea that Americans were down to earth self-reliant farmers. Not fancy, morally dubious aristocrats.

GRABER: But at the same time, pumpkins had another parallel image track going on. They were so easy to grow. People didn’t necessarily want to eat them but kind of always had them around, they were kind of looked down on.

OTT: It’s a crop that people that are poor farmers, they keep it in production. They, you know, put some seeds on a dung heap to try to have some food like extra livestock fodder. Or there’s people that are moving west that are desperate to have food and they’ll start planting some pumpkins. So they, they have that. So, it’s associated with a very poor way of making living off the land. “Pumpkin rollers” is a derogatory term for someone that’s growing pumpkin. Desperate times.

TWILLEY: And this association between pumpkins and poor, and by implication unsophisticated and ignorant people, is also how we end up with pumpkinhead as an insult.

OTT: And the pumpkin then represented an empty headed person. And this can go up to like, recent political cartoons where they’ll show like a debate scene and all three politicians will have a pumpkin head. So this is the idea that someone is big headed, but empty inside. So, you know, they’re full of themselves, but there’s not actually something there.

GRABER: Which is why one of the characters in L Frank Baum’s Oz books is called Jack Pumpkinhead—he’s not in the original first Wizard of Oz, he shows up in book two, and he’s not that bright.

JACK PUMPKINHEAD: Mom? Mom? Mom, is that you?

DOROTHY: No, I’m Dorothy Gale.

JACK PUMPKINHEAD: Oh, for a second there I thought my mom had come back.

BELINA: Ah, what is this, a man or a melon?

JACK PUMPKINHEAD: A pumpkin if you please. My name’s Jack, Jack Pumpkinhead.

TWILLEY: It’s like glass half full or half empty. Either way, the pumpkin belongs on the rural farm, but it’s either simple in the sense of down to earth and admirable, or simple in the sense of stupid.

GRABER: Like in Cinderella, where the pumpkin is literally both. It’s a plain vegetable that she might have lying around the kitchen, but it also becomes a wonderful, huge, useful carriage.

CINDERELLA: Why, it’s like a dream! A wonderful dream come true!

FAIRY GODMOTHER: Goodness me, it’s getting late! Hurry up dear, the ball can’t wait! Have a good time, dance, be gay! Now off you go, you’re on your way!

CHORUS: With a bibbity bobbity, bibbity bobbity, bibbity bobbity boo!

TWILLEY: Carriages and fairytales aside, all throughout the 1800s, fewer and fewer Americans were actually eating pumpkins. They were still grown on family farms, but honestly usually to feed livestock, and definitely not for market.

OTT: Its economic importance was zero.

GRABER: But also towards the end of the 1800s, Americans had finally established the traditions that would evolve into how we celebrate Halloween and also Thanksgiving. We talked about Halloween before in our Halloween candy episode, there was a tradition of carving turnips in Scotland and Ireland and immigrants brought those traditions to the US and they turned into pumpkin carving.

TWILLEY: Because apparently it was only a short step from rural poverty to kind of scary. Pumpkins grew likes weeds—and again, that was good, but also a little alarming.

OTT: That’s because, you know, some people say you could hear the thing grow. The vine, as you know, it’s like really long and it can like, grow in a day. The pumpkin, actual vegetable can grow in a day. So it takes on this ideas of wild nature that way predate the, the idea of the jack o’lantern that comes like in the mid to late 19th century.

TWILLEY: And at about the same time, the traditions around Thanksgiving shifted too.

OTT: Early on Thanksgiving is a day of fasting, a day of quiet reflection, a day of prayer. And then in New England, it started to mix the Thanksgiving with a harvest celebration, which is much more like what we think about with a big feast at the end of the season. A lot of people gathering together. Those kinds of things came together. And then it became a national holiday.

GRABER: Thanksgiving had been mostly a northern thing, a New England tradition. But then in 1863, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln declared that it would be a national holiday, and that it would take place on Thursday November 26 that year. And it’s been the last Thursday of November ever since. And very quickly that celebration was capped off with pumpkin.

OTT: In the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, you start to see in these—these women’s magazines, Where they’re promoting, you know, the pumpkin pie. And they’ll have like, a quotation from one of these saccharine sweet poems that have a picture of the pumpkin with the vine, and the pie. To show how all these things work together. And so the fact that you have, you know, a meal where there’s all kinds of things being served at once and then end with the celebratory pumpkin pie. That was the late 19th century, celebrating this patriotic idea that Americans are farmers at heart, virtuous people. And then the, you know, the pumpkin is a way to encapsulate all of that as a celebratory part of the end of the meal.

TWILLEY: So now pumpkin is a player in the two major autumn holidays. It’s at the center of both, filled with all kinds of symbolic meaning.

GRABER: But the weird thing was, as we said, pumpkins had, at that point in time, literally almost zero economic value, even as they were starting to become more entwined with American identity in the fall.

OTT: So when it’s going to start having economic value in the early 20th century, it’s going to be much more because of the ideas it represents than the meat itself.

TWILLEY: What happened was that, in the 1930s, people started to want to buy pumpkins again. Cindy told us a story of a farmer from Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, who remembered, as a kid in the 1930s, hauling a wagonload of pumpkins to feed his family pigs and being stopped by two well dressed men in a car.

GRABER: Those fancy men wanted to buy the pumpkins, which was a little surprising to the kid, since they were meant to be pig food. But he was like, sure. He sold a few, went home and told his dad, and his dad said, go get a load of pumpkins, hang out on the road and try to sell those, too.

TWILLEY: This same kind of story played out all across the US. And rural farmers embraced this new economic opportunity.

OTT: And they started turning their farms into these nostalgic farm stands. These like, farm stands of lore. And maybe you want to move into the suburbs and you’re just getting a new car, but then you can go out and you can experience this and you can take your kids out there so they can experience that Americana. And the pumpkin is a way that they maintain these connections.

GRABER: When the pumpkins were first sold on the side of the road, they weren’t all round and orange and perfect. Some were green, some were oblong, they were all kinds of different varieties, not necessarily the ones we’d even call pumpkins today. They were what we’d now call squashes. But over the decades that changed.

TWILLEY: You might recall that very recently we were told by a couple of squash experts that there’s no real botanical difference between a pumpkin and a squash. The only real difference, at least in the US, was symbolic—pumpkin was a name for something sweet, or something that you fed cows. Squash was just an ordinary vegetable, like cauliflower or potatoes, nothing to write home about.

GRABER: But as time went on, we’ve created an imaginary botanical difference where one never existed in the past. Today, a pumpkin is a round orange creature, it only comes from one particular squash species called C. pepo. This species includes the zucchini and other summer squash, also the acorn squash—

TWILLEY: You know what else is usually a C. pepo? All those decorative mother effing gourds!

GRABER: Unless those gourds have long necks.

TWILLEY: Right, in which case they’re not even a cucurbita, they’re a whole different species called lagenaria or bottle gourd.

GRABER: But one thing that C. pepos have in common is that they’re really not so awesome to eat.

ALEXANDER: I don’t grow pumpkins .I feel they’re deeply, deeply overrated vegetable,

GRABER: I’m sorry if you love acorn squash, early on they were kind of the only ones I knew to cook, but now that I’ve been cooking all the others, I can say that C pepos are kind of crap. Acorns are sort of stringy and not that sweet. And this is even before we get to their cousins the summer squash, which frankly, I also hate.

ALEXANDER: And that there are actually six different subgroups of summer squash, C. pepo. Or zucchini. Which are all actually relatively modern in breeding terms, coming out of Italy.

TWILLEY: And which are also on Adam’s “not really worth it” list.

ALEXANDER: Winter squash are altogether more useful crop than a, than a summer squash, in my view. Only because they have far more flavor.

GRABER: And they store for months!

TWILLEY: Sorry summer squash lovers. And acorn squash lovers. Fortunately, the entire point of all these not-super-tasty C. pepo orange pumpkins and decorative gourds is that we’re not eating them. Cindy says nearly 9 out of every 10 pumpkins grown in the US are not eaten these days—they’re just for display.

GRABER: But here’s the thing, if we look back at the story of the symbolism of pumpkins, they were kind of mythologized as this ideal of small self-sufficient farming. But today most farmers have a hard time making a living, and it turns out that pumpkins have become a really important crop that helps keep them afloat.

TWILLEY: These days, no all-American autumn is complete without a trip to the patch to get a pumpkin, served alongside some family friendly agritainment.

REPORTER: It’s a fall family tradition, a trip to the pumpkin patch. But on the central coast, you might want to take more than one trip with over a dozen patches to choose from.

VOICEOVER: A glowing sea of orange rows packed with all shapes and sizes. Where your most daunting task is picking the perfect pumpkin. [ENGINE STARTING] …And hay rides, of course. All the fun you can pack into one month.

OTT: And as it turns out, the fall stands and the pumpkin are actually the biggest moneymaker, more than strawberries or apples or these other things that, you know, we think about. But it’s, you know, this idea that the celebration of the small family farm, but they’re actually helping to rejuvenate the very thing that they, they represent.

GRABER: One of the things you might see at those pumpkin fairs, especially at the entrance welcoming you in, you might see a giant pumpkin. Like a really giant one.

ALEXANDER: What I find really interesting with squash is that, you know, in, in the States, there is a great interest in size. In everything. It had—squashes, no exception. Who can grow a squash that is going to break the back axle of a one ton pickup truck?

TWILLEY: The story of how the pumpkin got so big, plus the secrets to growing your very own axle-destroying squash, after the break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: As we said, pumpkins and squash were important to indigenous communities for many reasons, but one of them was that even hundreds of years ago, these were some of the physically largest crops you could grow, and newer Americans noticed this as well.

OTT: So in farm journals through the 19th century, there was always stories about, you know, Maggie this or little John somebody else, you know, producing a pumpkin that weighs 15, 20, then 200 pounds. There was actually a pumpkin that was described and put on display at the 1876 Chicago’s world’s fair. So the pumpkin was a huge tourist attraction there, that was maybe 5 or 600 pounds.

TWILLEY: That’s not going to break your truck’s axle. But then, in the 1970s, a Canadian farmer called Howard Dill took the seed from that World’s Fair pumpkin variety, and just supersized it. He kept breeding and breeding ‘til he had a patented new variety called the Atlantic Giant.

OTT: And that’s the seed that produced these like, crazy huge pumpkins. Where, it was in, I think, the nineties where they broke the thousand-pound mark. That people compared to breaking the, you know, the four minute mile in track. Now it’s over 2,500 pounds. And, you know, farmers aren’t growing these things. These are communities of people, individuals who are putting them in their backyard.

GRABER: These are people who specialize in growing giant pumpkins, they devote themselves to it, they compete for the most giantest pumpkin of all.

TWILLEY: And so of course we wanted to get the scoop on how they do it. So we called up Dave Stelts, he and wife grow giant pumpkins in a small town in between Pittsburgh and Cleveland. He told us it’s a family tradition that started with his dad.

DAVE STELTS: He’d go to local fairs and he’d enter multiple categories and he’s like, Oh, well then he just, you know, got a, one of these big max seeds. And we just kind of fell into the love of not only having that big bad pumpkin out in front of the house in the fall, but we also enjoyed watching ’em grow and see how fast they get—and then of course it’s a competitive edge thing too. You always want to beat the neighbor guy. And now it’s a worldwide thing. I just want to beat everybody worldwide.

GRABER: And Dave does compete at the worldwide level.

STELTS: We set the world record in 2000, at 1,140 pounds. So, you know, we consider ourselves on the professional level, and we’ve competed with the world and. We’re always at the top of the standings, pretty much every year. We’re the 1 percent of the 1 percenters. So it’s… you know, and we work very hard. And we’re putting 40 plus hours a week in it in season.

TWILLEY: That’s a full time job. So what is involved in growing these monster gourds?

STELTS: Well, there’s some really main staple factors that are really key to that. And A, is obviously, yes, the seed. We follow those and track those much like, you know, someone who breeds horses will take care of those. We can tell back genetics all the way to the ‘90s. And even before then for a little bit.

TWILLEY: Just for kicks, we should let you know right upfront that these giant pumpkin are not even pumpkins! i.e., they’re not C. pepo. They actually all belong to the C Maxima family, so their siblings are Hubbards and Kabocha squash

GRABER: And Dave has the C Maxima seeds that are just right for growing giant squashes—or, you know, giant pumpkins. But the problem is that pumpkins are pretty promiscuous and they’ll crossbreed with any other kind of squash around, so Dave and his wife have to protect those giant squash flowers from bees that might be bringing over other pollen. They often just stick red solo cups on the flowers.

TWILLEY: But you do have to pollinate a flower to get a pumpkin, so Dave has to be the bee. He has to get out there bright and early, just as the flowers open, and do the deed himself.

STELTS: We’ll take three to four males. And then we’ll rub the pollen back on the stamen. And then we’ll close that up and—I use a clothes pin to seal them up.

GRABER: Those newly pollinated flowers will then turn into baby squash. At that point Dave and his wife pick a winner, they choose one squash on the main vine and get rid of everything else. One squash to rule them all.

STELTS: Because we don’t want the plant’s energy going into producing the next generation. We already know we have it right there on the main vine.

TWILLEY: At this point, your average pumpkin farmer might sit back and relax. But that’s not how you get a world record at the pumpkin olympics.

STELTS: They take a lot of tender loving care. And we have heating cables and a whole bunch of other things we do to keep them warm. And we tuck them in at night with blankets as well. So. Whatever it takes.

GRABER: And as you can imagine, for something that gets so huge, it needs a lot of food.

STELTS: At 2000 plus pounds, you can imagine that’s a whole lot of eating. I mean, that’s, that’s the big boy at the buffet coming down every day, just ready to go. And you better have it there for him.

TWILLEY: A growing pumpkin needs regular feeding and it needs even more watering.

STELTS: In the regular season, now, when it tends to dry up a little bit, we’ve put up to 100 gallons per plant a day.

GRABER: And when it’s consuming up to 100 gallons of water a day, you know it’s growing fast. You can literally watch it happen. I mean, they’re growing like 50 to 60 pounds a day!

STELTS: And it’s fun to watch.

TWILLEY: You want your pumpkins to grow fast, of course, but there are issues with packing on that many pounds that fast. Pumpkins can get stretch marks and appearance is one of the judging criteria for some of the prizes at these competitions.

STELTS: They’ll get split, which, we’ve already lost two of our eight to blossom end split, which is a big killer out here. But it just grows so fast they’ll split.

GRABER: And you have to give them a way to move around because they’re growing so fast they could just break right off the vine.

STELTS: I mean, it’ll just break off and you’re done. There’s no more growing. So you’re constantly watching all that.

TWILLEY: Some growers put sand underneath their pumpkin hopefuls, but Dave has found that a sheet of plywood covered with conveyor belt fabric does the trick perfectly.

STELTS: It gives them a nice flat bottom. So it’s easy for them to grow out. They slide out as a pumpkin. It doesn’t restrict the growth. Plus being able to pull that back. So we can relieve that pressure off the vine is key.

GRABER: And that’s the goal: a car-sized pumpkin with a nice flat bottom.

STELTS: I was out there looking today. We got a couple buck and 6 foot wide right now. You know, the bigger ones. And they’re at 15, 1,600 pounds, probably. The—our bigger ones out there right now. And they still got two and a half months to grow.

TWILLEY: This all raises an obvious but overlooked scientific question: how on earth can a vegetable get this big? Other fruits and vegetables get large, sure, but not the size of a compact car.

GRABER: Scientists haven’t studied this thoroughly, but there is a paper out there about giant squashes, and it seems to be that they create more of the pipes that transport nutrients throughout the plant, so they create like a highway’s worth of food delivery systems as opposed to a small side street.

TWILLEY: Truly enormous pumpkins also seem to have thinner skin than their normal sized cousins, which likely helps give them the stretchiness to grow that fast.

GRABER: Scientists haven’t figured out if there’s a limit to the size a giant pumpkin can get to, and Dave says this is a topic of hot debate within the community.

STELTS: It’s like, wow, we hit a thousand pounds. You know, way back, you know, in the nineties. Like, well, you know, how much bigger can we get these? You know, is there a limit? Is there a cap on that? And I, I basically, after all these years, I surmised the one thing: when the human will has the desire not to push things forward, and not to grow things bigger, those weights will stop. ‘Til that, ‘til—as long as there’s innovation and, and the people wanting to push that forward and grow them bigger. Maybe there is a ceiling, but boy, at this time, I wouldn’t bet against it. I wouldn’t bet against that there will never be a 4,000 pound or maybe a 5,000.

TWILLEY: Which is five times as heavy as a grand piano! Back in 2000 when Dave set the world record, it was only—only!—1,140 pounds. By 2012, growers had hit the one ton mark.

STELTS: This year, I mean, the world record right now is 2,749 pounds. Our—our biggest ever is 2,376. I mean, we, a personal best, anything over 2,376 is definitely a plus. You know, so we first want to break that. But right now we would like to get three over 2,500 pounds.

GRABER: And three is key, because that’s what you need to get Grower of the Year, you have to bring three huge pumpkins to three different competitions around the country. Which begs the question: how in the world do you get them there and then weigh them?

TWILLEY: Dave and his wife have a Bobcat to lift the pumpkins up, and a flatbed truck and trailer with reinforced axles and special airbags to chauffeur them to the weigh offs.

STELTS: And then off we go. We’re down the road. It’s just tough to make time when you’re driving—and we’ll put this caveat in there that, you know, when you’re going down the road, and especially at night, all you see is flashes, you know, going off and people waving, Hey! Look at that! Y’all. But it goes slow because they slow down to see you get in the inside lane and you’re just blocked in. It’s like, okay, thanks.

GRABER: And then when they do finally make it to the competition, each pumpkin gets carefully lifted and weighed, and there’s lots of cheering and general delight.

STELTS: It doesn’t matter if you’re two years old or you’re a hundred and two. Everybody loves to see the big pumpkins. Everybody got to get their picture beside them. And that’s just a lot of fun. Seeing the smiles that they bring, and just, and then the— [ASTONISHED NOISE] Wow, that’s huge! You know.

TWILLEY: There’s the joy, there’s the glory, of course, but there’s also prize money. That said it’s not really enough to make a living, even if you sweep the board. So Dave and Carol also have a pumpkin brokering business.

GRABER: They buy these huge pumpkins, they transport them, and they sell them to people who want them, because giant pumpkins are popular as fall displays all around the country—at like, botanical gardens and county fairs.

TWILLEY: And some get eaten.

STELTS: But they’re usually by large mammals, namely at zoos. And we have a nice relationship with a few zoos across the country. I know that Pittsburgh zoo is picking a few up this year. They love to do their video cams and put it on it while they eat the pumpkins. They’ll smash them. They’ll play with them. Then they’ll eat them.

GRABER: We have a great video of elephants smashing and enjoying giant pumpkins at the zoo, you can find it on our website gastropod.com.

TWILLEY: Dave is obviously extremely proud of his pumpkins, but even he admits they’re not actually that tasty.

STELTS: Really at the end of the day, it’s not what you want. You want to get them small pie pumpkins you get at your farmer’s stand, you know, on the side of the road, you know, go get those. That’s what you want to make your pumpkin pie out of. No, you’re not making pumpkin pie out of these.

GRABER: And despite the fact that he spends 40 hours a week on pumpkins when it’s the season, he does still love that pumpkin pie.

STELTS: Oh, well, I, who doesn’t love pumpkin pie? I think it’s sacrilegious if you don’t love pumpkin pie and everything that goes with the fall. You know, I mean, it’s pumpkin funnel cakes, at fairs—I mean, it just, if it’s got pumpkin in it, I’m usually, I’m all in on that.

TWILLEY: The irony being that of course that pie and those funnel cakes, they’re mostly made using canned pumpkin and that canned pumpkin is also… not pumpkin! It’s squash! Nine out of 10 cans of squash in America are canned by Libby’s, they’re all grown in Illinois, and they’re all C. moschata.

GRABER: It’s true. Libby’s uses its own proprietary variety of a Dickinson squash for its canned pumpkin.

OTT: They look like cantaloupes, like long cantaloupes or something. So I think if you saw them, you would say that it was a squash. But of course they don’t call it squash pie, because that doesn’t mean anything. You know, they call it pumpkin pie and they call it canned pumpkin. Because of the deep meanings associated with that.

GRABER: Squash doesn’t really have any deep meaning associated with it.

OTT: I think people think a squash is something you eat and it doesn’t have any symbolic significance. You eat it in your daily life. You don’t really think much about it.

TWILLEY: Whereas the meaning of pumpkin? Cindy’s found that for most Americans, it’s beyond words.

OTT: They think of pumpkin as something that is—they don’t even know [LAUGHING] how to say what they think a pumpkin is.

[DECORATIVE GOURDS RAP]

GRABER: We have the story of Libby’s canned pumpkin puree, perfect for all those pumpkin pies, that’s in our special supporters’ newsletter.

TWILLEY: Which you can get by going to gastropod dot com slash support and signing up. Also on our website: links to all of our guests this episode—their books, their research, their giant pumpkins. Thank you to Lori Shapiro, Alejandra Domic, Cindy Ott, Adam Alexander, and Dave Stelts!

GRABER: And thank you as always to the fabulous Claudia Geib, our producer. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode, ‘til then!