When a cool breeze sends a chill through the air, bringing in the autumn season with its brightly colored leaves and spooky vibes, suddenly everything tastes, smells, and looks like pumpkin. People start their mornings drinking pumpkin spiced lattes and eating pumpkin poppy seed muffins. The supermarket shelves are stocked with pumpkin-flavored foods: cakes, cookies, muffins, coffee, pasta, and even mac and cheese. Stores will be selling clothes, blankets, and pillows covered in the shape of pumpkins. Bath and Body Works will roll out their pumpkin spiced scented candles and perfumes. But, why? Why pumpkin? How did this delicious gourd become so heavily associated with fall?
This association comes from a mix of different factors — when pumpkins are harvested, how they’ve been marketed to the public, and their association with fall festivals.
Harvest Time
Pumpkins have been associated with the harvest season for thousands of years, first being cultivated from September to November in Mexico around 7,500 years ago. Pumpkin vines helped the soil retain moisture, its flesh provided nutrients-rich food, and its seeds insured next year’s harvest. However, the first pumpkins were small and bitter with a hard shell, but Indigenous farmers bred them, focusing on their color, size, and flavor.
When European settlers arrived, they integrated pumpkin into their diets since it was easy to grow in the unfamiliar environment. Baked, boiled, stewed, or added into soups, these bright orange beauties saved lives during the brutal winter storms.
The Jack-O-Lantern
In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving written in 1820, his headless horseman character uses a pumpkin to stand in for his missing head. Once the book grew popular, it was just a matter of time before pumpkins were so closely related to autumn that they became one of the first things we think of when we think of the season.
After the headless horseman, pumpkins popularity grew because of Irish and Scottish immigrants. In the late 1800s, they brought over the Celtic tradition of carving turnips or other root vegetables to use as lanterns to ward off evil during their end of harvest season festivals. Once they reached America, these immigrants were introduced to pumpkins which they used to make their lanterns instead.
Pumpkins & The American Fall Season
Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to hear TikTok creators, such as @everything_delish, start out their videos by saying “When it becomes September first, I’m already making pumpkin inspired recipes.” Similarly, @emilyeatsthings begins with “It’s not officially fall in this house until I make a batch of these cinnamon sugar pumpkin muffins.”
But why? Why do we have to ring in the fall season by eating pumpkin-flavored things?
Marketing Professor Boonghee Yoo at Hofstra University may have an answer for us. “As humans, we have neophilia, and attraction to novelty. Customers easily pay attention to their new, curious communications and if they like them, they spread them to friends and followers, which creates viral marketing,” Yoo says in an interview with Spoon University. This is called observational marketing, when you hear other people’s opinions of something and it makes you want it too. Seeing one person make a Jack-O-Lantern or a pumpkin pie makes you want to make one too. Because of the slow integration of pumpkins sliding into mainstream media over many years, pumpkins slowly wrapped their vines around our hearts, becoming the food and flavor of fall.
“A mix of nostalgia, neophilia, and successful marketing act to connect pumpkin to fall products,” Yoo adds. “But from a bigger picture, countries and cultures have their own symbols for particular days and seasons. Pumpkin represents the American culture in fall celebration.”
Pumpkins used to help people survive winters, make soil rich with nutrients, and ward off evil spirits. Today, it is the symbol of autumn and Halloween, one we look for to start our cool mornings while watching the leaves change from bright green to pumpkin orange. So, drink your pumpkin spiced latte, eat your pumpkin pie and remember, pumpkins are so much more than just a decoration or a flavor.