Love your pumpkin
In recent years Halloween has become an iconic event for the wrong reasons. It is now one of the biggest single causes of food waste in the calendar with literally millions of pumpkins being sold in the days before All Hallows’ Eve. The vast majority of these having been turned into the traditional Jack O’Lantern for the night, then end up as refuse decaying in landfill in the first week of November.
With that in mind Somerset Waste Partnership (SWP) has come up with a series of creative suggestions that don’t detract from an evening of spooky fun, but do offer some alternatives to chucking your pumpkin into landfill afterwards.
For food ideas using your pumpkin, from roast pumpkin lasagne to pumpkin ravioli, take a look at the national “Love Food Hate Waste” website at http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com. Not to be outdone SWP’s suggestions include:
• Toast the pumpkin seeds to make a snack, and turn the flesh into soup and pies.
• Keep and dry some seeds to plant your own pumpkin for next year.
But when it does come to disposing of the left over bits of pumpkin, don’t forget that Somerset recycles food waste for use in the Anaerobic Digestion at Walpole, so please put your old pumpkin in your compost bin or kerbside food waste container.