Cheap Green
Halloween is not an especially green holiday. Children raid stores for elaborate outfits and plastic masks, and they return from trick-or-treating with pails full of Snickers and Kit-Kat bars.
It does not have to be that way, of course. In my (admittedly unoriginal) family, a simple sheet for ghosts usually did the trick. As for treats, some neighbors doled out cookies, nuts and other healthy, inexpensive, home-baked goodies. Sadly, my mother — like millions of others fearful of poisons and razor blades and other stranger dangers — forbade us from eating anything not packaged.
Kids being kids, we preferred candy to home cooking anyway.
One ever-more popular way to green up Halloween is to focus on the pumpkin. It’s at the heart of the holiday, after all — whether perched on the front porch or consumed as pumpkin pie, pumpkin seeds, or even pumpkin beer. (I recently bought this Vermont brew, and it’s perfectly tasty.)
And while by no means everywhere, pumpkins are increasingly available as organics.
Organic produce, meat and dairy products, on the whole, are less energy-intensive to produce. But they also tend to be far more expensive than their mass-produced counterparts — for a variety of reasons, including more labor-intensive weeding and crop maintenance (no pesticides allowed); higher risks of crop loss; and more expensive fertilizers.
So while an organic pumpkin may seem like a good green idea, the first question to ask is — do you really need one? Given that many people buy organic food in the belief that it is healthier to eat (though the jury is still out on that one), does it make sense to pay a premium for something you’re only going to carve up and put on display?
To some people it apparently does.
“It I guess goes to show the merits of certain people’s love and faith in organics,” said Mike Valpredo, a business-development officer at Donald Valpredo Farms, which is based in California. The company began growing and selling organic pumpkins — both for cooking and for Jack-O-Lanterns — when one of its principal clients, Whole Foods, requested it last year.
Nonetheless, the costs of growing organically makes it an expensive proposition even for Valpredo Farms. “We’re not getting rich off organic pumpkins,” Mr. Valpredo said.
Still, for those seeking to go organic in their pursuit of a pumpkin, the usual tricks apply — namely, shop around, and if you can find a way to defray the high labor costs that make organic food so expensive, that should help.
Pick-your-own farms, for instance, are fun and sometimes cheaper, though increasingly hard to find due to the cost of liability insurance. If you do find one (the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat has a local listing of sites, as might newspapers in other municipalities), don’t forget about the price of gas to get there.
At my food co-op in Brooklyn, New York, members are required to work for a few hours a month, no exceptions.
I stack produce at 6 a.m. some Tuesdays. I’d rather be sleeping, but it does mean that food is cheap — I can get organic pumpkins, for example, for $1.07 a pound, versus $1.49 a pound in a Manhattan Whole Foods.
Pumpkin pie, here I come!
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