This Halloween sees the second Oxford Pumpkin Festival following on from the barnstorming success of last year’s, the first of its kind in the UK.

You may remember the queues of people at Bonn Square last Halloween waiting for their free pumpkin soup – almost 1,000 people ate delicious soup made from surplus pumpkins.

So what’s happening this year in Oxford? The brilliant Good Food Oxford are once again running the show and this year’s Oxford Pumpkin Festival is a true celebration of food: creatively encouraging people to think about the food they throw away, challenging preconceptions and teaching new skills.

On Halloween itself there will be pumpkin carving at the Catherine Wheel in Sandford; the Food Surplus Café at East Oxford Community College are hosting a Halloween special pop up lunch using only perfectly good ingredients that would otherwise get thrown away, and Turl Street Kitchen are putting on a special Halloween-themed menu, including a three course pumpkin bonanza.

For those feeling hollow and empty after Halloween, on Sunday at Oxgrow Community Garden you can bring your empty pumpkins to be turned into bird feeders, plus food, games and gardening galore. There’ll also be recipes and pumpkin challenges happening across Oxford over the weekend – check listings for details.

The idea for the Pumpkin Festival came to me about 18 months ago when we were just starting out Hubbub, a new sustainability charity that aims to make environmental issues more relevant and tangible to people. I came across a statistic that grabbed my attention: 18,000 tonnes of pumpkin are sent to landfill every year in the UK, the same weight as 1,500 double decker buses. Absurd at a time when an estimated 5.8 million people are living in deep poverty.

It occurred to me that this could give us the ‘hook’ we were looking for to start a food waste campaign that would make the issue interesting and tangible to people. Halloween is the UK’s second largest retail festival after Christmas and many traditions have been imported from the USA, but the bit we seem to have missed is the eating as well as carving of the pumpkin.

We’d been introduced to some people in Oxford who we thought could help us bring this idea to reality; a few meetings later we agreed to trial the first ever UK Pumpkin Festival in Oxford, in partnership with Good Food Oxford.

With its vibrant food scene Oxford was the ideal place to run the festival and aimed to squash food waste through the Oxford Pumpkin Festival 2014. We ran an amazing 23 events with 2,065 participants, and prevented 1,325 pumpkins (3.3 tonnes) from ending up in landfill.

We wrote a ‘how to’ guide based on our experience in Oxford and this year 22 Pumpkin Festivals are popping up across the UK and even two in the United States. We’ve been amazed at the appetite for these events – which are about helping people to make the most of the food they have, in a positive, upbeat way.

The point is to celebrate the humble pumpkin – everybody’s favourite spooky staple – and show people how they can cook with it as well as carve with it, dispose of them responsibly and keep them out of landfill.

Food waste from UK households is falling, and the uptake of pumpkin festivals this year shows people in the UK are increasingly aware of the financial, environmental and social cost of food waste. Polling from Hubbub in September showed that 99 per cent of the UK public think food waste is an important issue.

So come along for a celebration of food and in doing so help us to make eating the pumpkin as much a part of Halloween culture as carving it.

GO ALONG
For more details about Oxford Pumpkin Festival events see goodfoodoxford.org/oxford-pumpkin-festival/ or hubbub.org.uk