As I’ve been repeating for a while, we do have many climate crisis solutions and one of the BIG ones is to stop wasting food! Stopping food waste would make a big improvement in the climate crisis, costs nothing but some forethought, and even saves you money. Win-win! So with those thoughts in mind, I went for a walk and saw all those jack-o-lanterns out there made from real pumpkins and thought “Pretty, but surely wasteful!” Welp, sure enough, pumpkins contribute pretty heftily to food waste.
According to Forbes (of all places!):
Around 900,000 tons of pumpkins are produced in the U.S. every year. Of these, a whopping 500,000 tons (approx.) are thrown away uneaten—contributing to nearly 40 million tons of annual food waste in the country. That's more than $218 billion worth of edibles.
Many of these are leftover gourds that are tossed in the trash post-Halloween once they have served their purpose as the infamous jack-o-lantern.
So Google to the rescue!!
There are answers all over the Internet on what you can do with your pumpkin besides just a jack-o-lantern. So we tackle this subject.