Origins of seasonal culture

We are now deeply in the apple and pumpkin-craze season, which is what we have come to expect after the berry craze of late spring and early summer, and then the tomato frenzy of high summer. Have you stopped to wonder where these seemingly-recent seasonal fixations came from? It's not just the power of advertising.

Plants have over millions of years developed some pretty specialized strategies for getting a leg up on the competition. Some vegetables, like alliums (onions and garlic) form a bulb in the sun's summer energy to persist, alive, over winter, using that stored energy to beat the competition, and sending up a shoot first out of the gate when the weather warms. In spring they're some of the first vegetables we get.

In the summer, as you may know, most of the "vegetables" we eat are actually fruits. A fruit, botanically speaking, is a part of a plant that contains seeds–surrounded with something tasty to help spread the seed or to decompose, offering fertility to the next year's germinating seed–such as a tomato, squash, strawberry, or apple. But it takes a lot of energy to grow a fruit (first the plant, then flowers, and finally the delicious fruit) and that's why these are our summer vegetables, needing a long time to accumulate enough growth and sunlight to produce the food we want to eat. Other fruits solve this problem by using stored energy from last year to get the job done earlier (strawberries) or have figured out how to survive year-to-year as bushes or trees.

Now, in the fall, we are back to brassica greens–biennial plants gaining a foothold in the cool, meager growing conditions of fall where other plants decline, in order to grow just enough to survive the winter and send up a seedstalk at the first hint of spring. And of course, we have the fall storage crops like potatoes, carrots, squash and, yes, pumpkin spice.

Seasonality is no accident, but a product of the principle of evolution--everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. Why pumpkins for Halloween? Why potatoes and butternut squash for Thanksgiving? These are the plants that arrive in this season, and these are the fruits and tubers developed to last through the cold months–surviving without rotting to keep people alive during the dead of winter, just as they would otherwise survive to put up new plants in spring. Of course, it's not to the squash's plan to produce a butternut only to be eaten up in December... but isn't that, in fact, botanical success, to be cultivated on purpose, grown with care year after year, its genetics persisting for having found the niche of sustaining human life? As we take in the Halloween displays since September, pumpkin spice for weeks yet to come, then turkeys, everywhere, it's a small comfort to know that all this amped-up insanity of the advertising world is based entirely upon pre-industrial agricultural reality. It's merely marketing finding its niche.

So, enjoy your Halloween pumpkins and your butternut squash at Thanksgiving, and even your pumpkin spice. You're not just being trendy after all! The opposite of recent fad, this is culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.