Why don’t Americans eat their pumpkins?

The thing that is actually different

Not the carving. He understands carving; children like knives and candles and there is nothing more to say about it. What he could not place was the category. In France a pumpkin is a vegetable. It is sold next to the squash, cut in halves and quarters so you can buy the amount you want, and it goes into soup. In America it is sold in a cardboard crate outside a supermarket, by the piece, at a size nobody could eat, and it is understood by everyone that nobody will.

Two billion pounds, and most of them never go indoors

The United States grows somewhere around two billion pounds of pumpkins a year. The American Farm Bureau Federation puts nearly 70% of that in the fresh market — the decorative trade. More than 1.3 billion pounds are then thrown away, overwhelmingly in the days after Halloween, which makes the humble jack-o’-lantern one of the more efficient food-waste machines in the Western diet.

And it is not carelessness, it is price

This is the part that changed how I think about it. Carving pumpkins sell for several times more per pound than pumpkins grown for processing into pie filling. A grower who plants for porches makes more money than one who plants for food. So the waste is not farmers failing to find a market; it is farmers responding correctly to the market they have. Americans did not decide to waste a billion pounds of squash. They decided to buy a decoration, and agriculture obliged.

What the French do with the same vegetable

Soup, mostly. Potimarron — a small, dense, chestnut-flavoured squash — roasted or blended with cream and a great deal of pepper. Potiron for a velouté. Butternut, gratin, a tart. None of it is a tradition anybody makes a fuss about, which is exactly why it survives: it is just what you eat when the weather turns. The vegetable never acquired a second career as an ornament, so it kept the first one.

The French do not carve them, and the reason is boring

Not taste, timing. Carving pumpkins is a Halloween practice, and Halloween never took hold in France. Without the holiday there is no occasion, and without the occasion a pumpkin stays what it was. You will see one or two carved in a shop window in Paris now, and French children are perfectly happy to do it. But nobody is buying a fourteen-pound squash to put on a doorstep for three weeks.

What he suggested, which I have not done

That we eat it. Not out of principle — he was not making a point about waste. He simply could not see what else it was for, and he does not understand buying food you have already decided not to cook. For the record, a carved pumpkin is not really edible by the time Halloween ends, which he regarded as further evidence rather than a counterargument.

If you want to do something about it

Buy two. One for the porch and one, smaller and denser, for the kitchen — a sugar pumpkin or a potimarron if you can find one. Carve late, close to the day, because a carved pumpkin starts collapsing within days. And compost the carved one afterwards rather than binning it; municipal food-scrap collection takes pumpkins, and a great many towns run a pumpkin smash the weekend after Halloween. None of that is a sacrifice. It is just not throwing away a vegetable.

The same squash, two jobs

He judges America weekly on Instagram, and Le Bulletin collects the best of it once a month.