Bad news in Green Month: the supermarket chains are pressurising UK pumpkin growers to whack up the heating in their barns to make sure the two million pumpkins they expect to shift for Halloween turn orange by October 31st.
In other words, farmers are spending time, money and natural resources to grow huge crops of pumpkins, and then centrally heating them for three weeks, not so that chefs can make lovely dishes out of them, but so that kids across the country can cut scary faces into them and then leave them to rot.
What a mad, mad, wasteful world ...