The Washington Post is putting a damper on the fall by invoking the “violent history” of America’s beloved seasonal tradition: pumpkin spice.
The report titled “Fall’s favorite spice blend has a violent history” set the scene of the Dutch’s 1621 invasion of the Banda Islands (located in modern day Indonesia), detailing that “Thousands were killed, others enslaved, and many who fled to the mountains were starved out.”
University of Texas at Austin historian Adam Clulow told The Post, “The Dutch company was later accused of carrying out what some describe as the first instance of corporate genocide… And it was all for nutmeg.” The report noted nutmeg is “one of three key spices in the blend known as pumpkin spice.”
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“A lot of commodities have terrible histories — there’s sugar and tobacco to think about,” Clulow said to The Post. “But nutmeg, now used in pumpkin spice, has the most compressed terrible history. Thousands were killed.”
“Today you can buy a jar of the spice mix, typically made with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger, for as little as $2.39, or drink it in Starbucks’s perennially popular Pumpkin Spice Latte, confident that the nutmeg wasn’t grown through means of violence,” The Post told readers.
Food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson noted to the paper that while spices were always a “natural course of trade,” the ones that formulated pumpkin spice “are rough with colonizer histories.”
“While the Banda Islands grew nutmeg, Amboina — a set of nearby islands also in Indonesia — was famous for cloves,” The Post continued. “The fight to control the clove trade was almost as bloody and dramatic as the battles for nutmeg, and nearly drove the Netherlands and England to war in the early 17th century, said Clulow, who is a spice historian.”
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Cinnamon, mostly found in Sri Lanka, was under the control of multiple colonizers from the Portuguese, the Dutch, to the British, according to the report.
“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 said,” The Post wrote.
Johnson went on to tell the paper, “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.”
The food historian said enslaved labor was key for the mass production and widespread availability of nutmeg and cloves, which many Europeans in the 17th century did not have access to.
Clulow told The Post that the image of Starbuck’s iconic Pumpkin Spice Latte reminds him of 17th century Dutch still-life paintings, specifically Pieter Claesz’s “Still Life with a Turkey Pie” which shows a table of “luxurious products” including cinnamon and cloves as described by the Rijksmuseum.
He said the painting is the “ultimate symbol of stunningly opulent, globalized consumption in the 17th century,” adding “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.”
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