Why Pumpkin Is The Star Of Your Halloween Festivities

With Halloween around the corner, a dietitian is offering some tips on incorporating pumpkin into the diet.

Taylor Stein at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York says pumpkins are a squash that's high in a substance that the body converts into vitamin A, which is essential to immune system health.

She says one can easily blend canned pumpkin into soups, dips, and sauces and it can be a healthy substitute for ingredients in baking recipes, such as heavy cream.

Pumpkin is also a good source of fiber and low in carbohydrates.

So why have pumpkins become a "thing" in modern-day USA? Here's some history:

Jack-O-Lantern traditions date back hundreds of years. The Irish story starts in the 1700's with Jack.

" A 'Jack' was a drinker, a liar a miser, a good-for-nothing character," said Anne Effland, a USDA historical researcher.

She says the story goes the devil was chasing Jack and Jack tricked him into climbing a tree. By carving a cross into the tree, the devil was trapped up there.

She says from that story the Irish began carving and lighting turnips to either guide souls along or scare them away.

As legend goes, poor old Jack died not long afterward, but was denied entrance into heaven and also to that other place (I guess the Devil was still mad at him).

When he tried to get into the Devil's domain, Lucifer angrily threw a smoldering ember at Jack. The enterprising Jack managed to place the ember inside a hollowed out turnip to help light the way for his endless wandering of the earth.

"When the Irish brought this tradition of the candle in the turnip to the US, there were not too many turnips around," Effland said. "But we did have these wonderful pumpkins that were even better suited for the job."

There were waves of immigrants created by the Great Potato Famine in the 1840’s. They arrived in America to celebrate Halloween and were able to find a very particular new world crop that was much larger and easier to carve than their root vegetables of home; the winter squash, the most famous of which is a pumpkin.

And so the Irish tradition of the candle (or light) in the hollowed out pumpkin was born.

Plus, we can then take the pumpkin "meat" from the carvings and make pumpkin pie and other treats.

And that sounds a whole lot better than "turnip pie."

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