Spice up your life, but leave pumpkin out of it

It’s the time of year that makes me want to curl up in bed and ride it out, maybe have the kids signal an all-clear before I emerge.

It’s the pumpkin spice season, and it must stop. Snow, we can’t stop. Rain, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, floods — all of this deserves our attention and planning initiatives here at home, and around the world.

Pumpkin spice is not a natural disaster, it is a man-made one. It has replaced bacon (yes, you can get pumpkin spice bacon) as the most misused ingredient, which itself replaced the act of deep frying everything from butter to turkeys to Mars bars.

I love pumpkin pie, always have, and assume I always will. Mom made excellent pumpkin pie, now my niece, Katya, does it. I do not have an aversion to sneaking vegetables into things to fool children; I used to hide shredded carrots in spaghetti sauce, and my sister makes a chocolate cake that is to die for — and it’s full of zucchini. So, you can see I’m not a purist about good cooks getting creative, especially when it comes to using the abundance we have of locally grown vegetables.

A pumpkin spice Pop Tart is not an example of that. Nor is a pumpkin spice marshmallow, yogurt, Cheerios, dog treats, smoothies, Blizzards, almonds, seasoning spray (what, you can’t find enough junk with this flavour embedded — you have to spray it on even more things?), tea and Jell-O. They also make pumpkin spice Clif bars, but those already start out tasting like dust and glue, so you can hardly make them worse. But Jell-O?

I’m sure it all started out innocently enough: Starbucks needed a reason to make you pay 10 bucks for a coffee, and it wasn’t quite time to shave a candy cane over the whipped cream or whatever they do to it. “Let’s use pumpkin!” shouted someone at head office, no doubt one July after they’d left Costco and seen all the Halloween decorations. That person has since been fired, because baristas are sick of making coffees that taste like squash or Christmas trees.

This was all once done with actual pumpkinish spices. But we’ve now drifted so far from any kind of meaning, we are just inundated with chemicals that echo the taste, along the lines of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter which, by the way, I can totally believe is not butter.

You know Werther’s Originals? The best butterscotch candies. I don’t even like candies, but I buy those. You can now get Werther’s in pumpkin spice. I will not be buying those, and I will now look askance at a company who had no reason to jump into the pool. You have bastardized some holy ground there, Werther’s, though Kahlua and Baileys are right there with you.

I can live with Oreos going pumpkin, mostly because I don’t eat them in any incarnation and Oreo has become the cookie company trying to top itself with nonsense flavours for so long, it’s almost like they want to be potato chips. You can get pumpkin flavoured kale chips, an absolute twofer on the foods-thatshouldn’t-be-foods front. If I took a rabbit turd and pounded it with a mallet then drenched it in butter and garlic, it would win a taste test against a kale chip. I don’t see how infusing that nasty little kale chip with pumpkin would help. I do eat kale slaw, but only because it’s wisely hanging out with cabbage and cranberries.

Cream cheese, pet shampoo, coffee creamer, pretzels, Pringles, water. Salsa, Pop Rocks, hummus, Frosted Flakes, cottage cheese. Every year the list grows, and some products are internet spoofs. There are no pumpkin spice condoms, nor Monistat cream.

I guess we found two places we won’t put pumpkin spice.

For now.