Helen Peacocke lists a variety of uses they can be put to ahead of The Oxford Pumpkin Festival

Although pumpkins provide cooks with a chance to create some tasty dishes, 64 per cent of people buy them at this time of the year to carve Halloween Jack-o’-lanterns. Only a third of those who hollow them out actual-ly use the flesh and seeds. This is a terrible waste, as this versatile vegetable is the perfect winter treat, especially if added to a curry, roasted alongside the potatoes for a Sunday lunch, turned into wine, or just cooked and mashed with loads of butter and served with a green vegetable such as spinach. Instead, householders all over the country throw the flesh out and although some place it into their food bin, 18,000 tonnes is sent to landfill during the Halloween period, which is about the same weight as 1,500 double-decker buses!

Hubbub is a new charity that aims to encourage us to think twice before we throw away the residue from a pumpkin carving. Their aim this Halloween is to rescue the pumpkin, by hosting The Oxford Pumpkin Festival (October 30- November 9).

The founder of Hubbub, Trewin Restorick, said: “Halloween is increasingly popular in the UK, but we seem to have ignored a crucial part of the US tradition: cooking with pumpkins rather than throwing them in the bin. With household food budgets under pressure and 18,000 tonnes sent to landfill each year it is time to rescue the pumpkin.”

Hubbub’s project Pumpkin Rescue aims to help consumers think about the food they throw away by providing recipes and new skills to help tackle food waste.

Hubbub has launched a five-point manifesto calling on communities, retailers and the Government to take action to end food waste. It calls for all supermarkets to make publicly available the amount of food waste they create and what happens to it, to ensure that safe and healthy surplus food is redistributed to charities and those on low incomes. The manifesto asks English local authorities to follow the lead set by the rest of the UK and increase domestic food waste collection provision from all households by 2020. They ask the Government to increase their Love Food Hate Waste campaign too. This campaign has been very successful in increasing consumer awareness of the benefits of preserving food that would otherwise be thrown away.

Throughout the festival there is a Twitter competition calling for your best pumpkin recipes and photos, five of which will win tickets to The Oxford Pumpkin Festival.

The festival launch takes place tonight at Oxford Town Hall. It will consist of inspiring short talks with food and drinks. At 8pm there will also be a food and waste-themed Catweazle Club which promises an evening of music and poetry at East Oxford Community Centre. Performers are invited to theme their performance around food, food-waste and the spookiness of Halloween.

Performers at the This is Rubbish event, to be held at OVADA Warehouse, 41A Osney Lane, will lead the audience through three courses of games and stories, while feeding them on nuggets of knowledge and tasty treats made from food that would otherwise be wasted.

Saturday’s event, Disco Soup, takes place from 11am-5pm in Bonn Square, where a free cook-up and feast will be open to all. Everyone is welcome to help cook up free soup for all to eat from produce that would have otherwise gone to waste. Previous events such as this have fed more than 600 people. There will also be a Pumpkin Extravaganza at the Castle Yard from 11am to 5pm. For details of other events go to: www.hubbub.org.uk

If you are unable to attend the festival but want to contribute to its theme, why not spend some time in your own kitchen cutting leftover pumpkin flesh into chunks for the freezer, turning some into pots of pumpkin soup (see recipe opposite) and adding pumpkin pieces to stews, pies and casseroles that you are cooking during Halloween and bonfire night.

Pumpkin scones are not just moist and tasty but are easy to make, as it is only a matter of adding cold mashed pumpkin flesh thinned down a little with some milk to a basic scone mixture. Pumpkin bread is equally good and certainly cheap to make if you are using leftovers from your carving session.

Use pumpkin flesh as a base for a vegetable curry and you won’t be disappointed as pumpkin absorbs any of the flavours in which it is cooked and doesn’t dominate the dish. Then there’s the seeds... they need to be untangled from the strings of flesh inside, washed and then seasoned with sea salt and baked on an oiled tray in a moderate oven for about half an hour until golden brown. Toasted seeds can be added to a salad for extra crunch, used to decorate your pumpkin bread, or just passed around as tasty nibbles. Try them, they are delicious.