I’ve got a lot of canned pumpkin lying around, and some of those cans are getting a little long in the tooth with a best if used by date of March 2015. I’ve also got some of the newer cans with best if used by dates all the way out to 2017, and there are some interesting differences between the two. Most notably, the calories have increased and the vitamin A content has seemed to decrease from the old cans to the new. It dropped from 300% DV to 200% DV. So I immediately began searching the internet for an explanation. I didn’t find anything even mentioning it, but I did find out a little more about this canned pumpkin. Libby’s grows a strain of pumpkin that they developed called Select Dickinson Pumpkin, the same they’ve been using since 1929 (basically, with some selective changes, I expect). So what happenned to the beta carotene? I don’t know for sure but possibilities could include: A change in the required DV of vitamin A or how they are required to measure it, selective propagation of only the tastiest pumpkins (which could just happen to have less beta carotene), or weather effecting crop growth so as to produce pumpkins with less nutrients.
