Author's Note: This story is about the Pumpkin Spice Latte, and how it changed the smell and taste of fall forever. Unlike our friends and colleagues at the Washington Post, who recently published an article titled, “Fall’s Favorite Spice Blend Has a Violent History,” we here at Pirate Wires think atrocities committed by the Dutch East India Company 400 years ago are pretty irrelevant to the origins of America’s contemporary pumpkin spice craze. While all of us in the United States bear the ancestral burden of America’s original sin — 17th century Dutch Imperialism in Indonesia — we just weren’t able to establish a connection between the battle of the Banda Islands in 1621 and this particular seasonal product. With this caveat in mind, please enjoy the article.

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I lit a pumpkin spice scented candle to help me write this. It’s not helping, really, because it's a cheap one from Walmart that keeps burning out. I’m not sure why. Maybe something to do with the wicks? In any case, in the few moments between the minute I light the candle and the minute it mysteriously extinguishes itself, my house smells wonderful. I feel safe and warm. It’s impossible to imagine anything bad happening when you’re smelling pumpkin spice. Take my three primary recurring fears: being murdered, being eaten alive by rats, and having a late-in-life schizophrenic break. It’s inconceivable that any of these things would happen to me when a delicate mix of sweet and spice is coursing through my nostrils. It would just be too weird.

My cheap candle is one of thousands of pumpkin spice related items available on the American market. Over the last year, Nielsen IQ counted over 3,072 pumpkin-flavored products, and that’s not counting menu items served at restaurants and coffee shops. The products range from the familiar — coffee creamer and snack cakes — to the bizarre: cat-litter and SPAM. In total, the global pumpkin spice market is expected to reach a market value of $1.1 billion and continue to grow from there. The smell, taste and even aesthetics of pumpkin spice have become a ubiquitous sign of fall, overwhelming the senses. 

It's easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way. But it was, well within living memory for most of us. Here’s what happened. In early 2003, top brass at the burgeoning coffee chain Starbucks’ “espresso team” sat around brainstorming what they hoped would be a blockbuster autumn drink, one that could replicate the success of the peppermint mocha they had released for winter the year before. They had “at least a hundred” ideas, but eventually narrowed it down to 20. Chocolate and caramel performed best on a survey of customers they conducted via mail, but an oddball addition — “pumpkin” — scored well on uniqueness, so they kept it on the shortlist. Later, they gathered at Starbucks “Liquid Lab” in Seattle and began concocting different drinks. Eventually, they perfected the recipe for the “pumpkin” drink, and decided that it tasted better than the chocolate and caramel drinks that customers preferred in the survey. Starbucks originally planned to call it the “Harvest Spice Latte,” but changed the name to “Pumpkin Spice Latte,” (PSL) because “the spices play a really important role in bringing out the flavors of pumpkin, while also highlighting the espresso in the cup.” It was a hit, and the company brought it back year after year, selling over 600 million PSLs in the last 20 years.

Not only did Starbucks create the pumpkin spice craze, they also gave it its name. Before 2003, “pumpkin spice,” was just “pumpkin pie spice.” The ingredients — cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and sometimes allspice — first appeared in a recipe for “Pompkin Pie” in America’s first ever cookbook, American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons. In 1934, the spice mix was bottled by storied American spice company McCormick. But it was just that — pumpkin pie spice — a convenient way to get half the ingredients for a single dessert most people only make for Thanksgiving.

The PSL changed that. Suddenly, the smell and taste of pumpkin pie spice, something most people would only encounter at their grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving, was available for multiple months out of the year. Importantly — and unlike pumpkin pie — it was mobile and convenient, something you could grab on the way to work and bring to the office with you. Unlike the humble vanilla latte, which hardly smells like anything, the PSL is highly fragrant. Like a nice perfume, it’s good fodder for office small talk: Oh that smells nice. Where did you get it? What’s it called again? The smell of the PSL moving around a room, is, I believe, the key to the its success. My mother, for example, hates both coffee and pumpkin pie, but she loves the smell of a PSL, and thus her house smells like a Starbucks two months out of every year. 

Of course, my mother’s candles and potpourri don’t make Starbucks any money, but the fact that it's still changed the smell of her home for multiple months out of the year is a remarkable testament to what they did to the culture — inadvertently, I might add. What’s interesting about the PSL is that it’s probably one of the most successful cases of corporate culture jamming to have ever occurred, but that wasn’t even the intent. This wasn’t their “Unicorn Frappuccino,” — a bizarre, colorful sugar-drink that was available for just one week in April 2017 — clearly designed to be conspicuously consumed on social media as meme-ish novelty (obviously it worked, I still remember it and I never even tried one). The PSL was just an attempt to create a pleasant seasonal drink that they thought people would like. In doing so, they changed the sight, smell, and taste of a season. 

It’s also changed the internet, in its own small way. In the 2010s, Pumpkin Spice became something of a light-hearted seasonal auxiliary to the “basic bitch” meme. The emergence of the meme in 2009 shattered many young women’s perceptions of themselves and was a complete disaster for my generation (only half-joking). Young women who fit the “basic bitch” meme — which was most of them, in one way or another — either had to “own” it by slipping on the UGGs and marching into Starbucks for PSLs to produce Instagram stories with hashtags like #basicandproud, or pretend they were “different” by proving they were “not like other girls,” which became a meme in and of itself. Regardless, the meme’s intent was always more playful than pejorative. Yet despite this, it’s catapulted pumpkin spice into the culture wars. “This is the season of crunchy leaves, chunky knits — and pumpkin spice latte misogyny” screams a headline from the Guardian. The take is — and there’s really no other way to put it — a bit basic. Apparently lightly teasing women for liking lattes and fall is misogyny. It’s the same word we use to describe what motivates the Taliban to beat women on the street, seemingly a very different phenomenon, but hey, one struggle I guess. 

One could theorize that this “pumpkin spice misogyny” is behind the slowly declining sales of PSLs, although I suspect other trends like work from home and penny-pinching during these uncertain economic times might also be to blame. Whatever the cause, I don’t expect it to be discontinued anytime soon. Even if Starbucks does discontinue it one day, its legacy will go on. The sale of pumpkin-flavored products is up 42% since 2019. The boom might be petering out, but the market is expected to grow by 8.2% over the next decade. Seasonal lattes come and go. Companies come and go. Pumpkin spice is here to stay. 

-River Page