The ugly American

 

It looks like a special effect from a low-budget scifi movie of the 1950s but it's actually the biggest, ugliest pumpkin of all time.  At 2,560 pounds Maverick, for such is its name, won the title and the $23,040 prize at the Half Moon Bay, California, pumpkin festival.  It even survived the trip from its birthplace in Minnesota.  Now what?

The pumpkin is America's national vegetable.  Pumpkins are raised by the millions at vast expenditure of time, fertilizer and increasingly precious water, mostly for decorating porches over a couple of weeks in October.  As if that isn't wasteful enough, thousands are employed in a "sport" called Punkin Chunkin, the object of which is to hurl them through the air "without the aid of electricity or explosives" and smash them, before presumably cheering crowds.  The distance record, if you care, is 4,438 feet.  Some pumpkins are processed and canned so bakers can use them in pie.  That's about it.  

Imagine you are in a country where food and water are scarce and you come across an account of America's Official Vegetable being raised not to feed people or animals but to be pointlessly destroyed.  What would you think of such a country?  How long can we go on being such a country?  Americans found a continent rich with everything people could want and despoiled it in five hundred years -- passenger pigeons, bison, trees, water, minerals -- where did it go?  Places in California soon will have no water to drink, much less to raise huge, disgusting gourds that nobody eats.  

It's early for Thanksgiving but I feel like this.