Amanda Shirnina
I live in Russia. Yes, still. And I’m a natural-born American with no Russian heritage. I even have a pretty great life here. But every year in October—or on the first day of September, if I’m being honest—something’s missing. That is the Perfect American Pumpkin. Like Linus anticipating the Great Pumpkin, I sincerely hope for the Perfect American Pumpkin to arise out of the Russian patch and appear before my eager eyes.
A pathetic Russian pumpkin
In 2017, I moved from the transcendent fall colors splayed across the gorges of Ithaca, New York, to St. Petersburg, Russia—where the first few leaves outside my window change from green to yellow in late August, then nothing else happens until the rest of them go brown in a flash and drop dead at the end of October. I moved from the land of fall festivals, twilit corn mazes at down-home farms, apple cider microbreweries, buying pumpkin-themed coffee cup cozies on Etsy, browsing wooden pumpkins at Hobby Lobby, and picking out the Perfect American Pumpkin at patches to the land of ugly, practical Pathetic Russian Pumpkins bred for taste, and taste alone. As Seinfeld quipped in an episode about a different Slavic nation, “Who leaves a country packed with p[umpkins] to come to a non-p[umpkin] country? It doesn’t make sense!”
During my first autumn in the biggest country in the world, I was deflated by the miserably pedestrian nature of the gourds on offer. Even the best orange pumpkins that older Russian folks grow at their dacha—a family country cottage, which most urban Russians seem to have—are lopsided, not evenly oranged, and rather more squat than your typical American offering.
More pathetic Russian pumpkins, monstrosities
Though the pumpkin is native to the Americas and not Eurasia, Russians can buy harvest-time pumpkins at the supermarket today just like Americans can.  » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/09/pursuit-perfect-american-pumpkinin-russia-amanda-shirnina.html