Fucking Pumpkin Spice

I happen to love pumpkin, I always have and I always will. My parents used to tease me and say I liked all things orange, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, oranges because it matched my red hair. I don’t know if that was true or not, I just know that those are some of my favorite foods.

There is even a story that at almost 11 months old for my first Thanksgiving I managed to eat a full portion of everything and even a full slice of pumpkin pie.

So it’s kinda my thing. One of my mom’s favorite recipes has always been a pumpkin quick bread because it makes two loaves so you can take one to a potluck and still have one to eat at home. Full of pumpkin, spices, walnuts, and raisins, what’s not to love?

My mom always canned pumpkin too, so we always had it around. I think we used to even make pumpkin cookies sometimes.

So in my twenties when the first pumpkin lattes came out I used to get them when we would visit Barnes and Noble and the Starbucks inside. I know lots of people are anti-Starbucks but this was the early 2000s, and back in those days they were one of the few coffee shops that had a dairy milk alternative and being married to someone allergic to dairy, it did determine where we shopped to buy coffee (and still does. Starbucks is one of the few places that has coconut milk as my hubby doesn’t like what happens to almond milk in coffee and let’s face it soymilk is not that good to drink if you’re male).

And it was pretty good in the beginning before it was everywhere. Like I said I happen to like pumpkin.

However almost two decades later, um, I could care less. We happened to be in a city recently and therefore stopped at Starbucks (we get our coffee from nice local shops whenever we can, but have yet to find them in Augusta) and I ordered a lightly sweetened (don’t add any sugar at all please) chai. I was really surprised at how pumpkin-y it tasted. Like really if you added some whip cream and nutmeg sprinkled on top it could have totally been a pumpkin spice latte.

Which wasn’t what I was going for. No, I wanted a chai, not the same thing. Chai has peppercorns and turmeric. Yes, it also has cloves, and ginger and cinnamon, but those peppercorns, and turmeric changes the taste quite a lot. Oh and cardamon, a good chai needs that as well and that definitely keeps it out of the pumpkin pie realm.

I still love pumpkin pie and make a couple for Thanksgiving (we often eat it for breakfast because who wants to cook breakfast with everything else on Thanksgiving??). I still eat pumpkin (it doesn’t need any sweetener in my mind). I even put it in my smoothies to change things up.

But I don’t need it in fucking everything.

I don’t need all the back to school, back to fall advertising to be only about pumpkin spice. Let’s face it there is so much more to fall than just pumpkin.

Thereare so many other lovely winter squashes to enjoy and appreciate. Change them up and get some other great vitamins.

Not that a pumpkin latte is actually providing you with anything of nutritional value. Not if you are buying it. If you are making it, possibly depending on the sugar and dairy you are using. But the stuff you buy at a store…. pumpkin flavor coffee and most beers do not have any pumpkin in them! I mean what’s the point. Why not just say cinnamon spicy coffee and beers? Why call it pumpkin when you aren’t even using it.

And don’t get me started on Jack-o-Lanterns. Just don’t.