Getting Smashed

…Cleaning up after Washington Irving

By D. Silverman

Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave
Without leaving a piece of youth
And our lives are forever changed
We will never be the same…
– The Smashing Pumpkins
“Tonight, Tonight”

The first Saturday of November, GrowNYC held its annual Pumpkin Smash at Abingdon Square Greenmarket—one of many such events citywide—to promote collecting food-scraps for composting (non-meat food waste is accepted year-round at two-dozen of its greenmarket locations along with other sites).

Judging by the growing mound of seed-studded orange mush that day—the smashers won the battle. (Lest you get the impression it was perpetrated by a band of candy-crazed children, rest assured, plenty of apparent adults (and apparent parents) took great delight in hurling halloween gourds into the proverbial abyss.)

In one of Washington Irvings’s most famous tales, Ichabod Crane, a gangly itinerant schoolmaster who hailed from Connecticut, “tarried” in Sleepy Hollow (Tarrytown) to instruct the local children.

Ichabod, an upright (and uptight) Yankee of puritanical disposition, was an interloper into the Hudson Valley community of rural Dutch farmers. After some ill-advised courting of the rosy-cheeked, 18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, the older man raised the ire of her other admirer, Brom Van Brunt, a strapping local youth already wooing Katrina. Then, then, then…

One starless night, as everyone knows, Ichabod was furiously chased on horseback by the galloping Headless Horseman, who carried his cranial appendage not above his shoulders, but resting upon his saddle. Just as the fleeing teacher was poised to make his escape across a bridge, the headless phantom hurled said head at Ichabod’s own, knocking him into the dust, from whence his person disappears from the story.

The next morning — “on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a spattered pumpkin.”

That a humble winter squash (Cucurbita pepo) was the lobbed missile of Crane’s comeuppance, is notable for two reasons.

Firstly, because the widespread popularity of the Sleepy Hollow legend soon led to pumpkins supplanting the rutabaga as the choice vegetal foundation for carved jack-o’-lanterns. In a great tendril of unintended results, the U.S. pumpkin patch now yields over 1,000,000,000 pounds of ornamental orbs annually, most of which are sent hurtling towards October thirty-first. (And many of which ultimately land in landfills.)

Second, because readers of 1820 would have understood a snide cultural food reference:

The expression ‘Yankee’—initially referring to Colonial Americans in general—entered usage in the 1700s, possibly a corruption or Anglicization of the common Dutch name Jan, or some variant. It was slang and bandied about with different nuances depending on context and tone.

As Taylor Mac has winkingly observed, the song “Yankee Doodle” was intended by British troops to poke fun at the dandy Colonists, deriding them as effete, inept, and unmanly. There’s even an oft-neglected squashy stanza: “And there I see a pumpkin shell / As big as mother’s basin / And every time they touched it off / They scampered like the nation.”

(Implying local twits would confuse a pumpkin for a fuse-bomb and try to ignite the stem then run away.)

But, during the Revolution, Americans proudly claimed the ‘Yankee’ appellation… and by the 1800s it could specifically refer to New Englanders of English Puritan stock—those thrifty practical types who favored the readily available native pumpkins and corn in their diets, and cod on Saturdays. In contrast to the descendants of Dutch merchants from New Amsterdam (clustered in NY, NJ & PA), who eschewed pumpkins—except in pies, which no one can resist!

So, in Dutch settlements along the Tappan Zee, tossing a pumpkin towards the cranium of Connecticuter Crane was a comestible jeer of “Yankee, go home!”

GrowNYC’s compost collection program, funded by NYC Department of Sanitation,* in partnership with local processing sites, has diverted something like 25 million pounds of food waste since its inception in 2011. That’s the equivalent of about two million 12-inch pumpkins—or enough to bake 10,000,000 pies!

Composting organic matter is an important component of the city’s waste management. It lowers the cost and burden of landfill, significantly reduces greenhouse gasses (less fuel for transporting trash long distances and less methane emitted from landfills), and helps replenish soil nutrients in local parks and gardens. It also curtails a source of food for street rats.

The Abingdon Square event brought in around 1,300 pounds of tossed holiday pumpkins—the same weight as a large steed, like the Headless Horseman rides. Those pumpkins along with other food scraps collected that day were composted by Big Reuse at their site beneath the 59th Street Bridge in Queens. GrowNYC currently handles about 24 tons of waste every week.

In memoriam to poor Ichabod Crane during the festivities he seeded, one might heed that old Yankee adage: “Waste not, want not.”

We’ll make things right, we’ll feel it all tonight
We’ll find a way to offer up the night
The indescribable moments of your life
The impossible is possible tonight
– The Smashing Pumpkins

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* NOTE: The City’s recently proposed budget cuts would end funding for community composting programs. Collection sites, like those at the 
greenmarkets, would close and more than 100 people will be laid off. Learn more and join with tens of thousands of neighbors in urging the city to continue community composting: www.grownyc.org/petition