Post by Graveyardbride on Oct 8, 2023 5:46:57 GMT -5
Washington Post Wants to Cancel Pumpkin Spice
The Washington Post has declared war on pumpkin spice. The article, entitled “Fall’s favorite spice blend has a violent history,” cites the 1621 Dutch invasion of the Banda Islands, now part of Indonesia. “Thousands were killed, others enslaved, and many who fled to the mounts were starved out,” all for the sake of nutmeg, one of the key ingredients in the delightful blend, the newspaper claimed.
“The Dutch company was later accused of carrying out what some describe as the first instance of corporate genocide . . . ,” Adam Clulow of the University of Texas at Austin told The Post. “And it was all for nutmeg. A lot of commodities have terrible histories – there’s sugar and tobacco to think about. But nutmeg, now used in pumpkin spice, has the most compressed terrible history. Thousands were killed.”
As an example, he cited Starbuck’s iconic Pumpkin Spice Latte, which, he said, reminded him of 17th century Dutch still-life paintings, specifically Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with a Turkey Pie depicting a table of “luxurious products” including cinnamon and cloves. It is the “ultimate symbol of stunningly opulent, globalized consumption in the 17th century,” he insisted. “It’s the same with these Starbucks lattes. You’re getting stuff from all over the world and repackaging it for wealthy consumers without acknowledging the history of the ingredients.”
Food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson added that while spices were always a “natural course of the trade,” those in the pumpkin spice mixture “are rough with colonizer histories.”
Another set of islands known as Amboina, also in Indonesia, produced cloves, and the battle to control the clove trade was almost as bloody as those for nutmeg, according to The Post. A third spice, cinnamon, was found mostly in Sri Lanka, which was under the control of multiple colonizers, including the Portuguese, Dutch and British.
“It was after the 1500s, when European explorers wanted to bypass the middlemen and create monopolies over sought-after spices, that the willingness to trade with indigenous people dwindled and things started to get violent ...,” Johnson alleged. “It’s true that if we didn’t consume food that hadn’t been touched by slavery and indigenous displacement, we wouldn’t be eating a lot of food . . . But whenever foods enter the pop culture lexicon the way pumpkin spice has in the U.S., it’s important to acknowledge how it reached us.”
Cancel George Washington Too! In a May 2022 article, The Washington Post published an op-ed calling for the renaming of George Washington University because the Father of our Country owned slaves. In addition to renaming the university, it was suggested that Mount Vernon Campus, named for Washington’s “slave plantation,” also be changed. According to the paper, the university’s nickname, the Colonials, and “George,” the mascot, also needed to go.
The foregoing, of course, begs the question: “If The Washington Post is so determined to cancel everything related to George Washington, why doesn’t it start the ball rolling by changing the name of the newspaper?!
Sources: Maham Javaid, The Washington Post, October 6, 2023, Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News, May 11, 2022, and October 7, 2023, and Caleb François, The Washington Post, May 9, 2022.
