Well, it’s nearly October, and you know what that means, right? Yes, halloween is coming, and yes, the leaves are turning beautiful colors, and yes, the days are growing shorter and yes, it’s really just the start of the christmas season…really. But what it actually, really means, is that it’s pumpkin spice season again! Already! And this year, Foodiness inc. and it’s evil cousins junk food inc. have been dipping their magic seasoning wands and fancy flavoring spoons deep into the cauldron of chemically synthesized pumpkin spice and drizzling their autumnal artificiality on just about everything! If you thought last year was the year of pumpkin spice…oh no, my friend, we’ve only just begun…to spice. This year may be the apogee, the apex, the pumpkin spice perigee, the breaking point. We may have hit peak pumpkin…spice that is. We’ll never hit peak pumpkin, because there’s rarely any pumpkin IN pumpkin spice, as we all know. No, what we’ve hit is the peak of Foodiness fakeout pumpkin spice “flavor”. All cloves and cinnamon and molasses flavoring, with a dash of dark orange color, and voila, pumpkin spice! Or pumpkin pie spice flavor…not actually pumpkin. Remember last year, right around this time? I did an episode on this very subject, and I thought I’d exhausted it, slain that dragon, milked that cow. But NO, this year, even more pumpkin spice flavored stuff has rained down upon us like a plague, like the swarm of locusts that wiped out the Ingalls’s wheat crop that one year in Minnesota. Pumpkin spice is upon us and there’s nowhere to run.
I really am starting to feel like Linus, sitting there all alone, in the pumpkin patch, waiting, quietly waiting for the Great Pumpkin. Not the Great Pumpkin Spice Latte, not the Great Pumpkin Spice Oreo, not the Great Pumpkin Spice Non-Fat Sugar-Free Yogurt Parfait (n a squeezy pouch)…just the effing Great Pumpkin.
Why, why? Why can’t we just accept things as they are? Why do we need to sweeten and flavor and falsify and foodiness-ize everything? Were we so traumatized by our winters on the prairie? Our collective diasporic history, fleeing oppression? We need to turn back the clock, return to our roots! Sarah Palin and her crowd have it all wrong, there’s no war on christmas, there’s a war on real. Real pumpkin to be specific. We need to put the pumpkin back in pumpkin spice, forget the Christ in Christmas, it’s too late for that and I couldn’t give a spiced crap about that one anyway. But putting the pumpkin back in pumpkin spice, that’s a campaign I can get fully behind.
So if you’re looking for me this October, I won’t be down here in the foodiness fallout shelter for the next few weeks, I’ll be out in the pumpkin patch. With Linus. Who I always had a little crush on anyway, I like the loner intellectual type…and we’ll definitely put that blanket to good use.