Pumpkin
October 8, 2004
That time of year is rapidly approaching. Soon the time of year will be here when I’ll be inundated with offers of the one food I cannot stand. It is autumn. The leaves are turning and mornings are cooler. Kids are back in school and night descends earlier. I love everything about the fall; everything except for one. For many, autumn is an end. It is the end of summer, the end of some plant life, the end of delicious fresh fruit. For others, it is a beginning. It can be the beginning of a new school year, a crisp fresh start to business after playing all summer long, a new menu of comfort meals. I think, no matter how you look at it, autumn is the one season that doesn’t really sneak up on you. We’re in the thick of winter before we’re ready for it. We wait for spring impatiently and yet ease into it slowly. Summer just seems to morph out of spring un-noticed. Autumn, on the other had, is suddenly here. It happened this morning, in fact. Today feels cooler. Even the noise of the cars outside sounds different today – more business like. Soon, very soon, everyone will be not only cooking with the one food I don’t like, but displaying it in front of their homes like a trophy: the pumpkin. I just don’t like pumpkin.
I understand the importance of eating foods seasonally. It is smarter, cheaper and overall just better to eat foods that are in season, and pumpkin certainly comes into season during the fall. Indeed, if you were asked to think of one vegetable that represented the autumn, you’d be hard pressed to come up with anything other than pumpkin. We’ll soon be seeing it on every menu: pumpkin soup, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin soufflés, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin risotto. Even Starbucks works pumpkin into one of their fall beverages. It all culminates on Thanksgiving Day with the final, and most disturbing concoction to me: pumpkin pie.
Nothing will inspire a gag reflex in me faster than pumpkin pie. I have eaten pumpkin pie when I’ve truly had to, but I have vivid memories of those occasions to this day. When I was in university, my best friend and I spent one Thanksgiving meal with my brother and his girlfriend. In true traditional fashion, the meal ended with a pumpkin pie that my brother’s girlfriend had made. My eating of the pie was a political move made even more difficult by the fact that my brother topped the piece of pie with homemade pumpkin ice cream! I am haunted by that Thanksgiving meal, though touched that he’d invited me at the time. Sometimes pumpkin pie has actually crossed my lips as an act of love. I ate a piece for someone I loved, so that they wouldn’t have to appear impolite to their hostess. I ate my piece first AND their piece of the pie that they too disliked. That is love, but alas, it was a love that didn’t last! My dislike of pumpkin pie, on the other had, is still alive and well.
I don’t like pumpkin. I never have. When I was young there was a handful of foods I didn’t like. The ones I remember most clearly - carrots, squash, sweet potato, yams, pumpkin – all had one thing in common. They were all orange. It wasn’t until I was well into my twenties and teaching at a cooking school in California that I was led to this revelation by a student. He told me he didn’t like orange vegetables. I instantly thought him crazy, that he would base a food dislike on a color, until I realized that I had the same issue as a child. How could that be? I liked oranges, cantaloupe, peaches, and apricots after all, and I still continue to like the colour orange. Orange, in fact, is one of my favourite colors. What was it that caused me, and obviously others as well, to dislike all orange vegetables? I wanted to find out. I researched and learned that beta-carotene is the carotenoid or pigment that causes vegetables to be orange in colour. Could beta-carotene have a flavour that some people might find unpleasant? Beta-carotene gives these vegetables its colour, but it is also present in dark green vegetables; the orange just gets covered up by the chlorophyll. I like those dark green vegetables, so it couldn’t be the beta-carotene that caused my dislike. I tried eating sweet potatoes in the dark. No luck. I was baffled. There seemed no good reason why I shouldn’t like all orange vegetables, and I was determined to make a change.
I set on a course to change my dislike of orange vegetables. I was going to try to like them. That I’ve actually tried to like a food for which I don’t have a natural affinity sounds strange to many people. Being a true food lover, however, I don’t want to not like any food. So, I started eating carrots – raw first and then cooked. I began to eat squash as one of a medley of vegetables to make it easier to consume. Sweet potatoes grew on me in mashed form. In due course then, I have tried to have pumpkin in foods when I can handle it. I’ve come to terms with pumpkin muffins. I can get pumpkin soup down when necessary. Pumpkin as one of many ingredients in a dish is barely acceptable. I still just can’t, however, even contemplate pumpkin pie. I have conquered my dislike of carrots, squash and even sweet potato. Pumpkin is the last food dislike standing. Perhaps I should leave it be. At least it’s something to talk about.