Front Porch: Pumpkin spice is making its annual assault on our nostrils

I can’t tell you just how much I hate pumpkin spice … but I’m going to try to.

I don’t know why this is. After all, I do love the taste of pumpkin. And pumpkin pie would be rather bland without the spices that go into it.

Yes, yes … I know, pumpkin spice is now the official thing that heralds the onset of autumn and the changing color of the leaves and all that seasonal feel-goodness of nostalgic home and hearth. That’s benign enough.

But, good god, the smell is everywhere, from hardware stores to gas stations. It seems to be wafting in the wind, like the aerial assault by the person who puts on some perfume or cologne and then puts on some more (believing that if a little is good, surely more is better) and whose arrival at any location is announced by an unpleasant assault deep into the nostrils of everyone in the room.

Pumpkin spice candles, doggie treats, hummus, lip balm, marshmallows and even macaroni and cheese, among other “spice-ified” products this time of year. Please, enough already.

And, of course, the king of all things pumpkin spiceish is the pumpkin spice latte (PSL), made popular by Starbucks in 2003. I don’t know why that particular flavor skyrocketed – rather than, say, persimmon lattes, but it did.

Canned pumpkin became available in the early 1930s, and some of the spice companies (such as McCormick’s & Co.) decided in 1934 to blend together cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves and sell them as pumpkin pie spice, so one didn’t have to have each of the spices individually on hand.

Good marketing. The stuff has been around for a long time. But turn a pumpkin pie somehow into an espresso drink and, voila, the PSL was born … and hooked us good.

I’ve come to learn that there is controversy about the phenomenon this spice has become. There are other curmudgeons like me out there. Welcome, brethren.

I think the biggest complaint I’ve read about is that in many of the products, there’s either no or not a whole lot of pumpkin present. “Lots of cinnamon and nutmeg, but I can’t taste pumpkin,” one person complained. Note: To their credit, Starbuck’s PSL does have pumpkin puree in it.

Cinnamon comes from the dried bark of evergreen trees. Cloves come from the dried flower buds of clove trees. Nutmeg is made from the ground seed of nutmeg trees. Let’s just call their commercial combination “tree spice” and leave the poor orange gourd out of it, thus lessening all the noise.

For me, I just don’t like the taste. Except in pies, where the ratio of pumpkin to spice is much more to my liking. I don’t want my candles or bath soap to smell like food. I don’t want to be inundated with the scent everywhere I go. It’s just overkill and, hence, repugnant.

I also don’t like beer, which is a subject for another rant. It’s not a temperance thing, just a taste thing, though my bock-beer-drinking German father would have frowned if he had known.

But with my lager loathing, I at least don’t have to inhale the smell of beer everywhere I go every fall (except at a football watch party), nor has it become so ubiquitous that I’m subject to sniffing some trendy beery-smelling air freshener in a car.

Yet.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.