God Didn't Make Big Orange Pumpkins

For Thanksgiving, I present this recent segment from The Splendid Table, the public radio cooking show. It features Logan Kistler, an anthropologist and curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, talking about where pumpkins come from.

Well, they come from the Western Hemisphere, but what I mean is where did pumpkins (and squash in general, all members of the genus Cucurbita and usually C. pepo) come from botanically or horticulturally? See, until about 15,000 years ago, they were tennis-ball-sized, almost all hard shell with not much soft stuff inside, and not only bitter but toxic to humans.

How did they become the basketball-sized or larger fruits we know that are kind of sweet and clearly not toxic? Kistler has the answer.

The most-fun facts I learned from the story:

• humans used the inedible fruits as floats for fishing nets
• the loss of mastodons led to more homogeneous forest landscapes in the Americas, and 
• squash/pumpkins were domesticated in six different locations within the Americas.

Photo by Infrogmation on the Wikimedia Commons.

Here's another example of the range that now exists within the C. melo species, as seen recently at one of my local food co-ops:


It's called turban squash.