uThe Pumpkin Harvest Is Over And The Shortage Is Realr

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  You might think that lots of rain would be good news for agricultural products, but it doesn’t really work that way, This year, high rainfall in Illinois, the area where most of our pie pumpkins are grown, means that pumpkin harvests are way, way down, and we might have to limit ourselves to only one slice of pie this Thanksgiving.

  That is, unless someone in your family likes to stockpile canned goods (Hi, Mom!) and you have pie filling from last year lurking in a cabinet. It’s too early to know how the jack o’lantern harvest will turn out, but canned vegetable company Libby’s says that their canning pumpkin harvest is over, and the yield was about half as much as usual.

  Pumpkins that end up in cans and in pies are smaller and less round than the kind we decorate for holidays, and record high rainfall in pumpkin country hit harvests badly. It also affected havests of, say, corn and soybeans, but have you ever seen a soybean pie?

  While there probably won’t be black-market pumpkin swap activity or illegal pie dens, a Libby’s spokesperson told Bloomberg that they’re expecting about half the normal quantity of pumpkins to use for pies. We’ll just have to make do with less pie, she went on to explain.

  While Americans are still going cinnamon bananas over pumpkin spice-flavored things, items that actually have some pumpkin in them are less popular. It’s almost as if a vegetable with a weird texture is less imteresting to Americans than snack-sized bombs of cinnamon and sugar.

  A Pumpkin-Pie Shortage Is Looming Thanks to Heavy Summer Rains [Bloomberg]

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist