Tonight’s pumpkins come from a family of plants that lost its best customer. Wild squash is bitter and toxic, hopeless for anything with a sensitive tongue, and yet its seeds turn up in mastodon dung in Florida more than 30,000 years old. The likely arrangement, argued in a 2015 paper, is that huge animals with dull palates ate the fruit and walked the seeds elsewhere, and that when those animals died out the wild plants went into decline. Some wild lines vanished altogether. Then, starting around 10,000 years ago and in several separate places, people took it up, for reasons that are still a bit of a mystery given the taste, and bred the bitterness out. It has always needed something to carry it off. The job used to go to mastodons. Tonight it goes to whoever can lift it onto the porch.