The Boo-tanical History of Halloween
The weather is cooling, the leaves are losing their chlorophyll and gently drifting to the ground, and the smell of wood fires (or wildfires) hangs in the gusty evening air. Depending on where in the world you grew up, the annual shift away from the sun will bring to mind a different basket of cultural meanings and associations. For me, a child of the Californian suburbs, these changes signify the approach of my favorite holiday: Halloween. As equal parts history nerd and plant nerd, I decided to take this decidedly unusual year to explore the botanical history of Halloween, from the plants associated with it most directly to those whose influence we often overlook.
Pumpkins
Oh! — fruit loved of boyhood! — the old days recalling,
When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!
-John Leaf Whittier, 1850, “The Pumpkin”
Gourds were one of the first crops farmed by humans, with evidence of their cultivation in Peru and Mexico dating back to 7000 BC. Pumpkins, particularly popular contemporary varieties such as ‘Sugar Pie’ and ‘Jack Little’, become so ubiquitous on the front porches and windowsills of American houses in October as to be nearly inseparable from Halloween itself. Their timely arrival, ripening right as the leaves start to fall and the harvest is nearly complete, explains some of their popularity in celebrations of the changing season.
But what about the most classic iteration of the Halloween pumpkin: the Jack-o-lantern? There are many legends as to where these grinning gourds came from, but all are a variation of the following mid-19th century Irish folktale: a man named Jack had lived an immoral life as a thief (or alternately as a blacksmith) but had managed to trick the devil into not taking his soul. When he died, he was barred entry to heaven, but had also made the devil promise not to accept him in hell. He had nowhere to go, so he asked the devil to help him search for a resting place. The devil mockingly threw him a burning coal from the fires of hell, which Jack placed into a carved-out turnip as a lantern (that’s right — turnips have a stake in this, too). He now wanders the earth forever as ‘Jack of the lantern’, or Jack-o-lantern.
Apples
Apples originated in what is now Kazakhstan and grew wild across much of Europe and Asia. There is a rich, often strange history of symbolic associations between apples and eternal youth. As Allison Richards writes, “In the failing autumn light, a shiny red or gold apple might have seemed like a promise — or an entreaty — that the sun would come again…And in the magical mix of image and meaning, ripe apples acquired the power and allure of a fertile woman’s body.” In early colonial United States, women would do tricks with apple parings on Halloween to try to divine the names of their future husbands. Apples and femininity, temptation and immortality — these are associations so deeply woven into our cultural fabric that they often go unnoticed. But what do they have to do with Halloween?
Bobbing for apples, while not as popular as it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is a classic Halloween tradition with a surprisingly sexy past. A tradition involving slobbering into a communal bucket of water may not find many takers this year, but the relationship between apples and Halloween has a much deeper history than just a game of swapping spit. Occurring during the time we now call October, the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in) marked the end of summer, the end of the earth’s productivity, and the beginning of a time of darkness and uncertainty. It was a moment of liminality, of the in-betweenness of all things: light and dark, seen and unseen, growing and dying. Celtic worshippers believed that the veil between the mortal world and the world of the dead was at its thinnest on the night of Samhain, and they kept bonfires burning throughout the night as protection against malicious spirits. To entreat the sun to return, they strung apples to evergreen branches and offered gifts of dried fruits and nuts to the gods. The Roman Empire had conquered most of the Celtic territories by 43 A.D, and over the 400 years of their reign, two Roman festivals became entwined with Samhain. One was Pomona, a festival devoted to the celebration of the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. Her symbol, the apple, may have been folded into Samhain celebrations in the form of bobbing for apples.
Potatoes
What do you mean, you don’t celebrate Halloween with potatoes? Well, neither do I, but potatoes are a large part of the reason why we celebrate Halloween in the U.S. More specifically, Phytophthora infestans — the fungus that was responsible for the Irish potato famine. In 1845, P. infestans spread quickly throughout Ireland, which was at the time a British colony. It killed up to three quarters of the potato crop each year over the next seven years, resulting in devastation for Irish tenant farmers who depended on the potatoes as a source of food. Although the fungus may have been the direct cause of the problem, cruel British mismanagement of the crisis was the reason that around a million Irish people died of starvation and related illnesses. Another million fled the country, immigrating primarily to the United States. The Puritanical roots of colonial North America had made celebrations of Halloween highly uncommon, but this began to change. As Irish traditions were folded into the fabric of American culture, Halloween became a well-loved tradition, a night to suspend the normal conventions of a conservative society and get a little weird.
Sugar cane
Those looking for a true Halloween fright need look no further than the sugar industry. A sweet plant with a bitter history, sugar cane is not a symbol of Halloween in any traditional sense. But with an estimated $2.6 billion spent on Halloween candy in 2019, we need to talk about sugar. The earliest traces of sugar cane domestication date back 10,000 years to the island of New Guinea, but cultivation of the crop was not done with any regularity until the European ‘discovery’ of the Americas. The gigantic, industrialized monoculture farms that have become the primary way our food is produced both in the U.S and globally are a specific technique tested and perfected through slave labor in the Americas on cotton and sugar plantations. These plantations, through the brutal extinguishing of human lives and local human and non-human ways of being, generated unimaginable wealth for European property owners and businessmen. This wealth, among other things, allowed the British to continue to finance their colonizing project in North America. As Khalil Gibran Muhammad writes, “None of this — the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic might and outsize impact on the American diet and health — was in any way foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk.” That barrier was overcome through enslavement, brutality and murder.
Today, the U.S is the world’s sixth largest producer of sugar, producing around nine million tons a year. Yet despite this surplus, the industry receives up to $4 billion in subsidies each year in the form of tariffs on foreign imports, price support and guaranteed loans. At the behest of the sugar industry, excess sugar is added — often without consumer knowledge — to food items ranging from the obvious (breakfast cereal and sweets) to the baffling (pasta sauce, salad dressing, and lunch meat, to name but a few).
As many a parent has grumpily informed their kid as they survey the Halloween bounty, sugar is terrible for us in the amount that we consume it. It damages our teeth, offers no nutritional benefit, and raises our risk for diabetes and a slew of other diseases including hypertension and coronary heart disease. The sugar industry’s calculated pushing of its products into our food at an artificially low price has racist and classist effects as well: the majority of poor and/or working class Americans cannot afford to opt out of these products.
But what good does knowing all of this really do? Halloween is, through a confluence of older traditions such as ‘souling’ and the concerted effort of the sugar lobby, inseparable from sweets. Taste is a powerful carrier of nostalgia, and I personally can’t imagine a Halloween without a few Reese’s peanut butter cups. A Michael Pollan-approved answer would be to consume it in careful moderation, but the sugar industry’s intentional obfuscation of its products in our food (until I began researching for this article, I did not know that barley malt and dextrose are sugar) makes it nearly impossible for most people to uncover what lurks within the depths of their protein bar. Boo.
