{"id":45097,"date":"2018-10-31T01:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-10-31T05:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=45097"},"modified":"2018-09-27T12:56:03","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T16:56:03","slug":"qotd-pumpkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/10\/31\/qotd-pumpkins\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Pumpkins"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>If it wasn\u2019t for Halloween, this grotesque and useless gourd would be extinct. And good riddance.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s. Review.<\/p>\n<p>Somewhere dotted about the fruited plains of America something like lebenty-leben gazillion acres of pumpkins are planted every damn year. Then care and water and chemicals are slathered on these fibrous tumors causing them to grow big. Some very big. Some so big that they can be hoisted into the air, dropped onto a car and obliterate said automobile.<\/p>\n<p>Many are midget pumpkins. This year I\u2019m seeing teeny-weeny baby pumpkins ripe for pumpkin abuse. But most are middle to large hunks o\u2019 pumpkin by the time they are \u201cready for the harvest.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Sounds so pastoral, doesn\u2019t it? \u201c<em>Ready for the harvest<\/em>.\u201d Except that when you actually \u201charvest\u201d a plant the assumption is that, somewhere, somehow, some people are actually <strong>going to eat the thing<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>This is the fate of only a smidgen of the pumpkins harvested. And even among those that actually eat of the pumpkin almost all are lying through their seeds when they say they like it. Pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, even (<em>shudder<\/em>) roast pumpkin \u2014 all foul concoctions fit only for the martyr mothers among us.<\/p>\n<p>I know that many will claim to adore pumpkin pie, but that too is mindless. Give me any thick paste and let me pour tons of cream, evaporated milk, pounds of sugar, scoops of cinnamon and nutmeg into a butter-laced and crisp pie crust and you\u2019ll love it even if the base plant was black mold from the basement.<\/p>\n<p>No, the pumpkin is not an acceptable food. But do we plow it under and eradicate it from our list of things we use farmland for? No. Because anything worth doing in America is worth overdoing, we expand the acres devoted to this parasite.<\/p>\n<p>Gerard Vanderleun, <a href=\"https:\/\/americandigest.org\/wp\/the-big-pumpkin-dump\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Big Pumpkin (Dump)&#8221;, <em>American Digest<\/em><\/a>, 2018-09-22.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If it wasn\u2019t for Halloween, this grotesque and useless gourd would be extinct. And good riddance. Let\u2019s. Review. Somewhere dotted about the fruited plains of America something like lebenty-leben gazillion acres of pumpkins are planted every damn year. Then care and water and chemicals are slathered on these fibrous tumors causing them to grow big. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,57,41,13],"tags":[86,924,1043],"class_list":["post-45097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-humour","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-criticism","tag-farming","tag-halloween"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bJn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45098,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45097\/revisions\/45098"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}