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Hey there, fellow Americans. It’s fall, and I think it’s time we had a talk about your autumnal gourd addiction.

If I’m being honest, it’s gotten out of hand.

You can’t throw a squash this time of year without hitting a gourd display. They’re in bins in front of grocery stores, in window boxes outside homes, uselessly encircling front-yard trees and filling decorative bowls on more dining room tables than I dare mention.

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We’ve known things were getting bad gourd-wise since the 2009 publication of humor writer Colin Nissan’s landmark McSweeney’s essay, “IT’S DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON, (EXPLETIVES).”

That should’ve been a red flag that what was once an under-control gourd curiosity had turned problematic. But we sailed right past it, and now, in the year 2022, we find ourselves a nation strung out on largely inedible herbaceous fruit.

Cucurbitaceae have become the fall enthusiasts’ hard-shelled cocaine.

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Here’s a shocking statistic: Each year, Americans buy more than 2 billion gourds, which works out to roughly 16 gourds per U.S. household.

I just made those numbers up, but the fact that you briefly believed them shows just how bad our gourd habit has become. 

What’s most troubling about American gourd-hoarding is the absurdity of the gourd itself. While gourds have been used through much of human history as cups, bowls and containers, the smallish fruits people fancy for decor tend to be both inedible and, more important, almost disturbingly weird looking.

Unlike the regal and often-symmetrical pumpkins we buy each year to carve at Halloween – smartly wasting the edible portions then setting the jack-o'-lanterns outside to slowly rot in the sun – decorative gourds come in freakish shapes, bent in places where no bend should be and covered in wart-like bumps. They look like a failure of natural selection. Like evolution popped off for a quick nap and came back to find … these things.

I’ve given them names for easier categorization, ranging from the Gnarled Ectoplasmic Filth Log to the Corn-Knobbed Blarplefart. But nothing I’ve done to point out the abject hideousness of these ungodly fruit errors has stemmed the tide of gourd enthusiasm.

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So with this column, I am formally calling upon President Joe Biden and his administration to issue an executive order to rein in America’s grotesque gourd dependency. It can be called the Mono-Gourd Accord, and the rules will be strict but simple.

Every American family is allotted one gourd per year. If a family cannot afford a gourd, one will be provided to them by the federal government, thus eliminating the widespread gourd inequity this country has wrestled with for so long. Under the Mono-Gourd Accord, no family shall go gourd-less.

Families will still be permitted to buy Halloween pumpkins, even though they are technically gourds. (In the accord, this is called the All Hollow’s Exception.)

Any family found to have more than one decorative gourd will be sentenced to one month in the pumpkin-spice mines of central Illinois and will be banned from burning scented candles for no fewer than two holiday seasons.

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Along with saving Americans money they might otherwise blow on their gourd cravings, the Mono-Gourd Accord will help in our fight against climate change.

Most of the gourds Americans throw out wind up in landfills where they release an estimated 12 million metric tons of methane, a greenhouse gas, each year.

That figure is also completely fabricated, but it sounds believable, and that’s why the Biden administration must enact the Mono-Gourd Accord immediately.

America needs a gourd intervention, Mr. President.

Please save us before we blow our retirement on shellac for the 12 dozen artisanal Corn-Knobbed Blarplefarts we picked up at the farmer’s market.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Twitter @RexHuppke and Facebook: facebook.com/RexIsAJerk

More humor and satire from Rex Huppke: 

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You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: America's gourd addiction: Why President Biden must mandate a one-gourd-per-household rule