I have always loved fall. That colorful, short season. Here in Colorado, the Aspen trees along the mountains turn a bright splash of yellow against the backdrop of green evergreens. In New England, the hills and valleys are awash in the brilliant orange of oak trees and elm trees and the bright reds from sugar maples. Those are the colors I miss the most. That is fall and I have never seen it like that anywhere else and I will never forget it.
I think about those days when the leaves begin to change color seemingly overnight, and then after a couple of weeks, a few fall, then more, and then a cascade, drifting down in their twirling dance, draping the yard. In Colorado, a stiff wind will blow the leaves off the trees quickly. I remember raking the leaves in the cool air, the mounds of leaves becoming a playground. Sometimes, raking would pull dozens of acorns along with them.
I still think about those fall days when the black walnuts drop from the trees. They are green and resemble limes, their scent akin to citrus.
Autumn is a bit of a paradox. We love it even more because it is so fleeting. We hold it close, and then it is gone, the trees bare and brown. A time of good-byes.
One thing that always seems to crop up this time of year, seemingly in everything we see, is pumpkin spice. I do like the occasional pumpkin spice coffee or ice cream, but I have seen it in just about everything. It does, however, have a violent history.
The invaders struck the island from three sides simultaneously.
The Dutch fleet of 1,655 soldiers and sailors and more than a dozen wooden ships landed at the Banda Islands, an archipelago located in modern-day Indonesia, in 1621. It was the most powerful military campaign the Dutch East India Company had sent to Asia thus far.
After a swift Bandanese surrender, the victors rounded up local leaders. They signed treaties that turned the Bandanese into Dutch subjects, then tortured them for confessions revealing alleged plots to attack the Dutch.
Thousands were killed, others enslaved, and many who fled to the mountains were starved out into the valleys.
“The population of around 15,000 Bandanese was decimated to just a few hundred in a few months,” said Adam Clulow, a historian and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “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,” he said.
At the time, nutmeg, one of three key spices in the blend known as pumpkin spice, grew nowhere else in the world. It was considered a miraculous substance, rumored to cure the plague, make consumers more beautiful, sharpen the memory and calm the mind.
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 was not grown through means of violence.
Some spices are part of a natural course of trade. It just happens that the main spices in pumpkin spice are fraught with colonizer histories.
While the Banda Islands grew nutmeg, Amboina - a set of nearby islands also in Indonesia - was famous for cloves. 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.
Cinnamon, mostly cultivated in Sri Lanka, was first controlled by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and eventually the 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.
It is true that if we did not consume food that had not been touched by slavery and Indigenous displacement, we would not be eating a lot of food. But whenever foods enter the pop culture lexicon the way pumpkin spice has in the United States, it is important to acknowledge how it reached us.
Pumpkin spice products are firmly established as an economic juggernaut today. Sales of pumpkin spice products (not including those at restaurants and coffee shops) totaled more than $802 million in the year ending July 2023.
In the 17th century, the average European knew about nutmeg and cloves but probably did not have access to them. But once the plantations began using enslaved laborers to mass-produce the crops, the increase in supply caused the price to fall.
Over the next century, supply increased because the spice plants were taken to other regions including Mauritius and Réunion, and eventually Sri Lanka and Grenada. Soon, the once-exclusive spices could be found in recipe books.
One of the earliest recipes for pumpkin pie was written by Amelie Simmons in the first-ever American cookbook, published in 1796. It used lots of sugar and spices.
By the mid-19th century, nutmeg, mace, cloves, cinnamon and ginger became common, and foods such as gingerbread cake, spice cake and spiced pumpkin and apple pies became indelible parts of American food history.
Soon you did not even have to blend pumpkin spice at home. It came prepackaged in a bottle. Contrary to popular opinion, McCormick was not the first company to create “Pumpkin Pie Spice” - Thompson & Taylor beat the company to it by at least a year.
In 1933, an advertisement appeared in newspapers for Thompson & Taylor’s Pumpkin Pie Spice. McCormick’s website says it manufactured the “original” spice in 1934.
Another early reference to “pumpkin spice” appears to be a 1936 recipe. “Pumpkin spice cake is a desirable dessert for a family dinner, and a healthful pick-me-up for children after school,” read an outdated recipe, referring to pumpkin as a food of the “Italian peasantry."
When the Dutch had first landed on the Banda Islands, they behaved like traders. In 1599, they paid a port fee and bartered nutmeg for cotton and other manufactured goods.
Their 1621 conquest sprang from years of failed attempts to win a monopoly over nutmeg.
A lot of commodities have terrible histories - there is sugar and tobacco to think about. But nutmeg, now used in pumpkin spice, has the most compressed terrible history. Thousands were killed.
Today, nutmeg has no negative connotations.
Photos of Starbucks’s Pumpkin Spice Latte, however, remind me of still-life paintings by Dutch masters from the 17th century.
"Still Life with a Turkey Pie," painted by Pieter Claesz in 1627, depicts a table filled with luxurious products: olives, savory pies, fruits, nutmeg and cloves.
The painting is the ultimate symbol of stunningly opulent, globalized consumption in the 17th century.
It is the same with these Starbucks lattes. You are getting stuff from all over the world and repackaging it for wealthy consumers without acknowledging the history of the ingredients.
So, however you enjoy your pumpkin, remember that the season goes by quickly. More quickly, it seems, than any other. Always look at those fall leaves while they hold on for all they are worth.
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