Pumpkin: The curious history of an American icon
Abstract
Why do so many
Americans drive for miles each autumn to buy a vegetable that they are
unlikely to eat? While most people around the world eat pumpkin
throughout the year, North Americans reserve it for holiday pies and
other desserts that celebrate the harvest season and the rural past.
They decorate their houses with pumpkins every autumn and welcome
Halloween trick-or-treaters with elaborately carved jack-o'-lanterns.
Towns hold annual pumpkin festivals featuring giant pumpkins and carving
contests, even though few have any historic ties to the crop. In this
fascinating cultural and natural history, Cindy Ott tells the story of
the pumpkin. Beginning with the myth of the first Thanksgiving,
she shows how Americans have used the pumpkin to fulfull their desire
to maintain connections to nature and to the family farm of lore, and,
ironically, how small farms and rural communities have been revitalized
in the process. And while the pumpkin has inspired American myths and
traditions, the pumpkin itself has changed because of the ways people
have perceived, valued, and used it. Pumpkin is a smart and lively study
of the deep meanings hidden in common things and their power to make
profound changes in the world around us. Cindy Ott is assistant
professor of American Studies at Saint Louis University. "From the
symbolism of pumpkins in classical and medieval mythology, to locavores
and harvest festivals, Ott's paean to pumpkins is important,
entertaining, and enlightening." -Warren Belasco, author of Food, the
Key Concepts "Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon shows how
a plant that we ignore for most of the year is all the more important
to the popular culture of the United States and to the imaginations of
its citizens precisely because we pay attention to it so occasionally.
By reencountering it at harvest time, we remind ourselves where we come
from-though, as Cindy Ott so playfully reveals, the story of where we
come from, like that of the pumpkin itself, is a good deal more
complicated than we think". © 2012 by the University of Washington Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-029599195-5
Original language: English
Document Type: Book
Publisher: University of Washington Press
