Saxton Freyman received his first jacknife on his eighth birthday, which he used right away to carve his very first pumpkin. Years later, he used that same knife to create many of the characters in Play With Your Food, this time with fewer injuries!

Saxton and his wife, Mia, started eeBoo Corporation, which makes really cool, and fun products like growth charts, cookie cutters, and stacking blocks. It was through Mia that Sax learned about Joost Elfer's idea of doing a book on carving veggies. Together, they immediately began working on Play With Your Food and Play With Your Pumpkin.

Joost Elffers began creating books in the early 1970's. Since then he has come up with really fun books full of imagination, like Oragami, Cat's Cradle, and Anamorphoses and the Games of Perspective. In 1978, he created his first fruit characters in Die Radieschen Maus im Kaseloch.

Since Joost is a foreigner, he was not too familiar with the Halloween tradition of carving out jack-o-lanterns. He was surprised to see that Americans never noticed the cute nose pumpkins already have-their stem. With his friend, Saxton Freymann, he started the book Play With Your Food.