TCS: A PSA about PSL

I posted a photo of the peppermint goat cheese on Facebook/Instagram and I won’t ignore that 3 or 4 of my dear readers astutely noted that alongside the peppermint goat cheese there was pumpkin goat cheese. So, yes, I purchased the pumpkin goat cheese and the review will follow below but I first need to make a special announcement about pumpkin spice.

This would probably be a more appropriate post for September or October, but as I alluded to in my last post there is about to be a new pumpkin in charge and who knows if we’ll even make it that far. I’m just going to get this out now:

I, the Curious Shopper, am wholly and completely uncurious about pumpkin spice products, and am generally reluctant to blog about this disturbing trend in seasonal foods. This is not to say it could never happen – I’ve certainly posted on pumpkin pie flavored potato chips and pumpkin spice Holidrizzle popcorn in the past. But in the time since I have made a serious decision: if I start purchasing and tasting and blogging about strange pumpkin spice products for no other reason that they are strange pumpkin spice products, it will simply never end. And it will slowly destroy me, both emotionally and financially.

First, the mental cost: I have already wasted an embarrassing amount of time either standing the grocery store or reading Buzzfeed posts, internally debating whether certain pumpkin spice products were truly strange to begin with. For example, contrary to what every Trader Joe’s hater out there would have you believe, it is impossible for seasonal pumpkin spiced bakery items to be odd or strange or even a problem. Gourds are seasonal produce, and pumpkin is a valid baked good flavor! Chocolate, vanilla, lemon, strawberry, pumpkin…nothing is weird about any of these things showing up in a dessert.

Here is another rule of thumb that is sure to be controversial in the blogosphere: if it isn’t weird to put butternut squash in it, it isn’t weird to put pumpkin in it. Pumpkin fettucine, pumpkin lasagna and pumpkin ravioli are not weird. Pumpkin soup is not weird. Stop adding them to your “20 photos that prove pumpkins have truly gone to far” listicles.

But even if I hard-stop filtered out all of the cakes, pastas, cookies, candies, breads, bagels, muffins, etc., I would still likely go broke trying to purchase all of the genuinely strange pumpkin spice products. The idea of a “slippery slope” is a logical fallacy everywhere in the universe EXCEPT for the realm of pumpkin spice products. When dealing with pumpkin spice products, the slippery slope is, in fact, a logical certainty.

Let me explain:

Sweet, innocuous pumpkin spice lattes led to pumpkin spice non-dairy creamer, which we then decided would be fine to drink straight up, without coffee, bringing us pumpkin spice soy-, almond- coconut- and cow milks, which then led to pumpkin spice yogurt. These are all seemingly acceptable things, as a corollary to the baked good rule above. However, pumpkin spice yogurt then beget pumpkin spice hummus, begetting pumpkin spice salsa. Pumpkin spice salsa clearly requires pumpkin spice tortilla chips, which beget pumpkin spice Pringles, which beget pumpkin spice Triscuits, which, naturally, brings us to pumpkin spice goat cheese.

Pumpkin spiced dog treats, you ask? Why they were brought to you by pumpkin spice chicken sausage. It’s likely that all of the pumpkin spiced meats, jerkys, dry-rubs, what have you, originated from pumpkin spice butter (a direct sibling of the yogurt).

The disease has spread to drug stores, where pumpkin spice soda beget pumpkin spice seltzer, which inevitably brought us pumpkin spice gum.

None of these things need to exist. I also don’t need to taste them, because I am pretty freaking sure they taste like cloves and cinnamon. Guess what? Cloves and cinnamon taste good with fucking everything, a phenomenon discovered somewhere on the Indian subcontinent approximately four thousand fucking years ago. I just don’t have any curiosity about the practice of adding cloves and cinnamon to random foodstuffs, and any post about it would be so boring.

Here is an example of some pumpkin flavored non-desserts I have tried:

Pumpkin Triscuits – these were really tasty. They tasted like Triscuits but with cloves and cinnamon.

Pumpkin goat cheese – this was really tasty. It tasted like goat cheese but with cloves and cinnamon.

So while I will always eagerly take any suggestions or donations for things to try from all of my beloved blog readers, I hope you will all understand that it is exceedingly unlikely that there will ever be any more pumpkin spice posts in the future.

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