Halloween pumpkins: Four ways to avoid wasting them – Helen Martin

Food waste is a huge problem and it’s a scandal that we are throwing away so much edible pumpkin flesh, writes Helen Martin

Kids should be taught to cook with the flesh of carved pumpkins - not throw it out. Picture: SWNS

WE’RE all aware of car pollution, carbon emissions, plastics, flights, damaging chemicals and additives in household buys from cleaning products to cosmetics, and everything else that’s ruining our environment.

Our council has high ambitions, governments have set targets to achieve, and protest marches are going on across the world. Supermarkets, manufacturers, industries and every other business has to consider harmful elements it issues.

But the one thing every home can do most easily is to cut back on food waste.

The waste of pumpkins at Hallowe’en is shocking with 18,000 tonnes of the edible squash being dumped in the bin.

We’re supposed to be learning how not to waste food, yet that weight is apparently the equivalent of 1,500 double-decker buses. And we have people depending on food banks.

It’s hardly a good lesson to kids to help them carve and make a lantern then chuck out the flesh.

It has so many options we can teach them to cook too.

There’s pumpkin soup. Use it as part of mash. Or cut it into wedges – with or without the skin – and turn it into chips.

And if we’ve followed the Americans by substituting turnip with pumpkin, why not try the classic US pumpkin pie?

Learning not to throw stuff out just because of a sell-by date, or because veg has wilted, is part of the exercise. But who in their right mind would cut fresh-veg-flesh out and throw it away?