Demand Makes Pumpkins Go All Weird
We regularly read about supermarkets’ finickity insistence on straighter parsnips and rounder tomatoes, and how it costs farmers a fortune. In America, customer demand is driving one crop in another direction. It’s all down to Halloween, of course. While standard round, orange pumpkins are still a popular culinary buy, the annual festival of the weird and spooky drives a huge demand for fruits that look, well, bloody horrible. Pumpkins with warts, veins and bulges in any shade but the standard orange fly off the shelves. The demand for gruesome gourds is producing whole new, uglier varieties, which sell at a premium and are testing breeders’ ingenuity and the genetics of the big, tasty globes.
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