Spam Series, #1: Pumpkin Bullsh*t

a round-up of the most offensive products I found this week

Land O’ Lakes Pumpkin Pie Spice Butter; Pillsbury Pumpkin Shape Sugar Cookie Dough.

Welcome to Weekly Spam, a series devoted to the most offensive products I find at the grocery store.

Fall has gone too far.

The unlucky pumpkin has been selected as the mascot of not just Halloween but the entire season. We have become pumpkin abusers—carving and burning it from the inside out, churning out endless ASMR loaf cake videos (a dubious drizzle here, a cinnamon swirl there), adding spices to lattes and syrups, allowing Natural Flavors to masquerade as the real thing, and sitting back while marketing teams all over the world use this poor squash to further their agenda and capitalize on the public’s desire for cozy vibes.

Seems like a lot to put up with, especially when the ingredient PUMPKIN is actually rarely featured in the majority of these seasonal products.

Did you notice how both products in title image are cleverly named to avoid implying that pumpkin is an actual ingredient? Pumpkin “pie spice” butter, not pumpkin butter. Pumpkin “shape” cookie dough, not “pumpkin cookie dough”. Why is this? Big Food has (somewhat) learned their lesson about how to work around fake food claims and still sell a product that sends the same message. (read more about the fascinating and hilarious litigation surrounding food labelling and one lawyer who uses these language nuances to win cases in The New Yorker’s “The Lies In Your Grocery Store" published September 4th).

Back to this week’s spam:

This past weekend, I visited the Big Y supermarket in Mystic, CT with a group of high school friends. We—that is, the Big Y and me—have a contentious history after some comments made on Yelp in 2019, but we’ve both matured a bit since then. At least I thought so.

After finishing our shopping, my friends and I almost made it to self-checkout before being blinded by the fluorescent orange, sickening display pictured in the title above and below. It felt like a pumpkin spice-flavored fever dream.