2,560-Lb Minnesota Pumpkin Coming for New York Pumpkin's Throat
We hate to see them fight like this
It’s a terrible time to be a pumpkin. This has been established. You sit in a pumpkin patch and have nothing but time to think about what horrific path your future might take (carving, rotting, a child drawing on you, being so big that a tractor has to haul your ass to get weighed at a festival), and about what your future could have been (pumpkin bread). The stress gets to you. You start to look around. You get jealous. You foster contempt within your pumpkin heart. You get … competitive.
It’s a devastating thing to witness.
Last week, a 2,554-lbs. New York pumpkin begrudgingly set the U.S. record for heaviest pumpkin of all time (in the U.S.). This New York pumpkin — he had little in life. No friends. No family. No name, even. He had no known pumpkin talents or interests. What he did have, though, was his title (heaviest pumpkin).
And now he has nothing.
A Minnesota pumpkin broke the New York pumpkin’s record on Monday at the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay, CA. This pumpkin came in at 2,560 lbs. If my math is correct, this is — devastatingly — a mere six pounds heavier than the New York pumpkin … the New York pumpkin whose only small source of happiness (pride in being large) has now been crushed.
Though the Minnesota pumpkin set a new North American record, the world record remains with that Italian pumpkin you might remember (he was 2,703 lbs.). Similarly, the Minnesota pumpkin did not best that U.K. pumpkin who tried to escape his large pumpkin life by jumping into traffic.
It is easy to blame the pumpkins for being so competitive with each other. Yes, it’s easy to look upon them and say — why can’t they just be happy that they’re all so large? Why must one of them grow a few pounds heavier just to take a U.S. record from the New York one from last week? But it’s time to look in the mirror. Who drives them via harness on a tractor to the pumpkin festivals? Who poses with them for the AP photographer, usually while wearing a dusty old baseball cap? Who has their name recited on NPR? Who gets the cash prize, if there is one? It’s not the pumpkins, my friends.
It’s not the pumpkins.
