Don't Bin Your Pumpkin
Halloween is the one night we buy food, carve a face into it, stick a candle inside, and leave it lit on the doorstep. It’s a lovely ritual. The real surprise, though, comes the morning after, when it turns out the humble pumpkin has plenty left to give.
The numbers are hard to ignore. Hubbub estimates that of the 30 million pumpkins bought for carving each year, around 16 million end up uneaten. Over half thrown straight into the bin. People often claim they don’t know what to do with them. That’s partly true, but it’s only half the story.
The rest lies in how we shop for them. Walk into any supermarket in late October and you’ll find pumpkins stacked high, sold on size and looks alone. Nobody tells you what they taste like. They aren’t sold as food, they’re sold as props. Yet Hubbub found only 42% of people realise the flesh of a carving pumpkin is even edible.
A product marketed as a prop will be treated as one, and then people are blamed for binning it.
The waste isn’t a moral failing, it’s a design flaw. One fix is to buy a single pumpkin and think of it as food first. The big carving pumpkin is watery and bland, bred for looks and a thin wall that’s easy to cut. The smaller, denser ones, such as a Crown Prince, a butternut or a Baby Bear, are sweeter and roast far better. A modest face is still possible, and the rest is dinner.
Carving on the day keeps the scooped flesh fresh.
The seeds are the real prize - packed with zinc, magnesium and healthy fats. Drop them in cold water, pull off the pulp, and pat them bone dry. Toss them in oil and sea salt, then roast at 180°C (160°C fan) for 15 to 20 minutes, until golden. The white outer shell crisps up, giving you a crunchy snack for twenty minutes of work.
If you do end up with a big carving pumpkin, the scooped-out flesh is the weakest part, so it needs a little help. Roast it hard until the edges catch, then blitz it with stock, garlic and plenty of spice. It makes soup rather than mush.
The lantern is different. After days on the step with a lit candle, it’s decoration, not dinner. Chuck the shell in the compost or the food waste caddy.
Does this change the climate? Not on its own. But a pumpkin is a cheap, low-stakes place to practise the habit that does cut household waste: looking at a whole ingredient and planning what it becomes before it rots.
We make a similar case in a recent piece on caring for ingredients once they’re home, arguing that small habits like these mean less gets thrown away.
On the first of November, if the pumpkin is caving in, you were just sold a prop.
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