Giant pumpkins
By Cindy Ott
At this year’s Topsfield Fair in Massachusetts, Ron Wallace broke the world record for the biggest pumpkin yet with a specimen weighing in at 2009 pounds. Photographs of Wallace next to this colossal body of orange flesh made headlines not only in the regional Boston Globe but also the nationwide Huffington Post. Yet every year in the popular press scenes of a pickup truck with its bed filled to the brim or a grown adult comfortably nestled inside a single giant pumpkin document the variety’s comically huge size.