Are Pumpkins a UK Fad?

Last year the British purchased over one million pumpkins for Halloween – the sale of what are called culinary pumpkins, the smaller ones that can be baked in the oven, is also on the rise. What is driving this popularity?

Halloween

Partly it’s the commercial focus. Although we think of it as a recent festival, imported from the USA, in the UK Halloween is now the third most lucrative festival after Christmas and Easter. Woolworths estimates that we spent around Ł100m every year on Halloween.

The idea that it’s an American festival is wrong too, Irish immigrants in the 1840s took Halloween to the USA. In that country around 86% of people now decorate their homes for Halloween and it has turned into a Ł1.7bn industry. Funnily enough, just as we get in on the act, many people are ceasing to celebrate Halloween because they think it’s anti-Christian!

In the late 1990s, inspired in part by a slew of Halloween themed horror films that were made in the USA, this more commercialised version started to emerge in Britain. Its rise in popularity has triggered a huge demand for pumpkins. Of the one million bought in the UK last year for Halloween, 99% were used for carving into decorations, not necessarily as food.

Nutrition

However, we can’t simply put this demand down to Halloween. In addition, more people are eating seasonal food and recognising the value of vegetables in their diet, with the five a day and food pyramid systems influencing them to try new foods.

Health conscious people are much more interested in eating and experimenting with seasonal fruit and vegetables grown in the UK, and of course, because the Americans eat it much more than we do, the influx of new recipes has an influence. We’ve developed a taste for pumpkin pie!

Are Pumpkins a UK Fad?

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