MORTON, Ill. — Mark Pfeifer loves pumpkin pie more than any sane healthy man should.
The warm autumn air is thick and sweet, and the sound of metal blades mashing pumpkins drowns out conversation as Pfeifer -- the operational manager of Libby's processing plant -- loosens his belt for his daily dessert duty.
Pfeifer slips into the plant's laboratory. There, among the test tubes and glass beakers, sits a line of pumpkin pies.
Warm. Welcoming.
The pumpkins used to make these pies have been grown and canned in this central Illinois town, which produces 80% to 90% of all the canned pumpkin sold in America.
Before the pumpkins hit store shelves, Pfeifer must taste-test a sample from each batch. Using the recipe printed on the back of the can, the plant's test kitchen reproduces the baking steps taken each year by countless home cooks, and Pfeifer is here to make sure the pumpkin lives up to its part.
Blended with spices and condensed milk, the pumpkin mixture is poured into pie shells and baked. Pfeifer walks across the linoleum floor, grabs a knife and cuts a slice no wider than his thumb.
"Every day, there are pies that we have to taste. That's every day we work, every day for 10 weeks or more," Pfeifer said. "I'm on my feet for 13 hours a day, working in 100-degree heat, and I'm still 20 pounds overweight."
From the first days of harvest in late August to early November, when the canning is completed, this plant processes about 150,000 tons of pumpkins -- or enough to make 90 million pies.
Lined up, crust to crust, they would span from Plymouth Rock to the Oregon coast five times, said Tim Miller, a quality assurance manager for Nestle USA, which owns Libby's and the processing plant. That's enough dessert to fill a road that would stretch halfway around the world.
"We have a lot of time on our hands during the off-season to figure these sorts of things out," Miller said.
Although food historians can trace recipes for pastries filled with a mixture of stewed squash, sugar, spices and cream to medieval times, experts say the modern pumpkin pie dates to the 1700s. By then, European settlers had adapted their holiday traditions of serving meat or fruit pies and began using local crops such as pumpkins.
Over time, recipes were passed down among families and neighbors, and the pumpkin pie soon became a Thanksgiving tradition. A pie recipe has appeared on Libby's cans of pumpkins for at least 50 years.
