What Do You Know About Pumpkins And Pie?

Pumpkins are the most famous of the winter squashes. That is right pumpkins are a vegetable. They come in various sizes, color and sweetness. The most common familiar color is orange.

Special pumpkins are used for making pies. They are called pie pumpkins or sugar pumpkins. They generally weigh two to four pounds. There flesh is sweeter and less stringy.

History
The tradition of eating pumpkin at Thanksgiving came from the Pilgrims, who settled in New England.
The custom was to serve the pumpkin with its head and seeds removed. The cavity filled with milk, honey and spices. It was then baked until tender.

Now the pumpkin is served at any time of the year and pureed, either fresh or canned. This is used to make sweet golden pumpkin pies.

A little story about Libby´s:
90% of the pumpkins grown in the United States are farmed within a 80 mile radius of Peroria, Illinois. The town of Morton, close to Peroria, is claimed to be the Pumpkin Capital of the World.

Libby´s pumpkin processing plant is located in Morton, Illinois. Nestle Food, a Switzerland company, owns Libby´s. Libby contracts with private farmers and supply the proprietary seed and the equipment to grow their patented pumpkins.  About 5,000 acres of the farm land is devoted to producing the Dickinson pumpkins for Libby.

Libby´s Select Dickinson Pumpkins are a special strain of Pie Pumpkin used by Libby´s (a division of Carnation Company) for their canned pumpkin. These pumpkins are larger than your normal pie pumpkins. Pie Pumpkins weigh about 5 pounds. The Dickinson’s weigh 10 to 14 pounds, are oblong and tanned in color. They have a much thicker orange flesh and less open space in the center.

How Libby´s Canned Pumpkin puree makes it to your store shelves:

Libby uses Dickinson pumpkins which are larger than your traditional pie pumpkin you find in the stores. These pumpkins take about 105 warm days from planting to maturity. They weigh about 12 pounds.

The Dickinson pumpkins are smaller, squatter, meatier, heavier and sweeter than the Halloween pumpkin. It has a creamy texture and fresh pure pumpkin flavor

The harvest for the Dickinson pumpkins is in late summer and through the fall. The Dickinson pumpkins are harvested mechanically, using machines that snip the pumpkins off the vines and line them up in a row.

After being cut off their vines the pumpkins are left in the field for an one or two week curing period.

A tractor with a conveyor belt collects the pumpkins from the field and dumps them into a padded truck. The pumpkins are transported to the Libby´s processing plant in Morton, Illinois.

At the processing plant, the pumpkins go through a disinfectant wash and then rinsed. They get chopped and cooked.

The pumpkins are pureed and canned, which will take less than 24 hours from the farm field to canned pumpkin puree.

During the harvest, the factory can process 500,000 pumpkins a day into cans.

Now off to big chain stores and your local grocer.

The future of Canned Pumpkin puree is in DANGER:
Libby´s supplies 90% of the world´s pumpkin puree in just over 5,000 acres of contracted and leased farm land.

This is not good for you and I for two main reasons.

1. Libby´s has total control over the future prices of canned pumpkin puree. They control 90% of the world market for pumpkins. If they want to increase their profits, they can easy raise prices to no end, that is until the market refuses to live without pumpkins.

With no real competition, the consumer would need to just live without canned pumpkin or boycott Libby´s.

2. Reason number two is the most scariest because it has already happened in 2009.
All the world´s pumpkins are grown in such a small area of about 5,000 acres. All the pumpkins in this small area are all of the same patented Dickinson pumpkin variety.

Libby´s processing facility is located in Morton, Illinois, and almost all of the pumpkins are grown within a fifty-mile radius of the plant.

Disease and bad weather conditions could destroy 90% of the world´s pumpkins in just a matter of days. This exactly what happened in 2009.

A 15 ounce can of Libby´s Pumpkin puree went from $1.80 to $7.00. This was just because of a single year of bad weather.

Imagine what the danger will be if multiple years of bad weather or disease took over Libby´s pumpkins. No more pumpkin pies unless you grow it yourself or wealthy enough to eat a $50 dollar pumpkin pie.

If different varieties were used in Libby´s pumpkin puree, a diseased crop would not spread so quickly. It might just attach a single variety while preserving another.

The same applies to the weather. Different varieties of pumpkins will mature at different times of the year. Some might get hit with bad weather while another could wait until the weather cooperates.

Conclusion:
You get the story that Libby´s just about owns the pumpkin market and the towns they use for their patented pumpkins. And Libby´s is at the mercy of mother nature and of plant diseases.


What is in a can of Libby´s Pumpkin Puree?
Nothing is added to the canned pumpkin puree, no salt, no sugar, no artificial flavorings, no colorings or preservatives. Some water is removed to concentrate the pumpkin for an even consistency and fresh rich taste.

Libby´s uses pumpkins they call Libby´s® Select Dickinson. Libby´s owns all of the rights to this modified pumpkin. So do not try to look if you can grow it yourself.