- Ah, the pumpkin spice latte, an autumnal joy to behold.
It's that time of year
when you can find pumpkin spice anything.
Pumpkin spice Cheerios, pumpkin spice butter,
pumpkin spice protein powder, pumpkin spice dog treats.
It might be hard to believe,
but pumpkin spice wasn't always that basic.
Travel back a couple hundred years
and pumpkin spice was only in pies.
Crazy. I know.
So, how did it turn into the omnipresent spice
we can't help but fall for today?
Do you see what I did?
Did you like that?
Or was that cheesy?
This is why we're so obsessed with pumpkin spice
in six minutes.
Ready? Let's go.
To truly understand pumpkin spice,
we have to start with the history of the pumpkin.
10,000 years ago in a cave in Mexico
a smaller, more bitter pumpkin took its first baby steps.
Today, we're more into stabbing pumpkins
than actually eating them.
But back in the day, pumpkin was a popular food.
Over thousands of years,
people indigenous to the Americas cultivated the plant
so it could be cut up, baked, boiled, and eaten.
And because the pumpkin was relatively
easy to grow in the Americas,
pumpkin became a staple of the American colonists diet.
Yeah, the pilgrims even used pumpkins to make beer.
♪ We have pumpkin in the morning ♪
♪ Pumpkin in the noon ♪
♪ If it were not for pumpkin we would be undoon ♪
(glasses clinking) Hey! Hey!
I'm a pilgrim.
Their love of that giant squash was even felt overseas.
And in France chefs began sweetening this potato mash
into a pastry to make a tart.
They called pumpkin, pepion, which means melon,
which the English then translated to pumpion,
almost pumpkin, almost.
The States adapted these early recipes and names
to create an early version of the pumpkin pie
which became a celebrated food among abolitionists
and anti-slavery activists
who could easily grow the pumpkin on their own,
i.e. without slave labor.
Now pumpkin pie became a quintessential autumn flavor
when Sarah Hale, the 19th century Martha Stuart,
helped establish Thanksgiving
and the pumpkin pie as an essential Yankee dish.
Now before Hale,
Thanksgiving was primarily celebrated in New England
and every state had a different date for the holiday.
Hale wrote letters to four presidents
calling to nationalize the holiday.
Dear President Lincoln,
I really think this Thanksgiving idea has legs,
turkey legs, if you get what I mean.
Finally, President Lincoln took up her cause
as a way to unite the States after the Civil War,
plus the pumpkin was already associated with abolition
so it really fit the holiday perfectly.
And yes, Thanksgiving has its own problematic history,
but it's really always just been an excuse
to bring together family and food,
specifically pompkin.
But enough about pumpkin because you might not realize it,
but pumpkin spice doesn't actually contain any pumpkin.
It's more pumpkin adjacent flavors.
And come fall, it's everywhere.
So, when and how did the pumpkin spice mix start?
Meet pumpkin spice's precursor,
aka the spice daddy,
aka mixed spice.
In it cinnamon's a dominant flavor,
along with nutmeg, all spice and a few others,
but it's missing ginger.
It's close, but daddy spice still gotta make sweet love
to ginger spice.
Not that Ginger Spice. That one, yeah.
In 1796, Amelia Simmons published the recipe
for what we consider the classic American pie flavor
in "American Cookery".
The recipe which made a pudding-like pie filling
called for ingredients like one pint of pompkin
and a spice mix of mace, nutmeg, ginger and all spice.
Yeah. Amelia forgot the damn cinnamon.
But we're getting closer.
Fast forward 130 years to the 1930s,
the Washington Post publishes a pumpkin spice cake recipe
finally freeing the pumpkin spice
from the confines of the pie.
Companies like Thompson and Taylor, McCormick
start selling pumpkin spice blends
in order to make cooking easier.
Because measuring out your own cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg
and sulfiting agents is so hard, you know.
And around the turn of the millennium
growing behemoth Starbucks
started branding its coffees with holiday flavors.
Flavors like peppermint mocha to join the eggnog latte,
but they needed something to join the fall lineup.
So in 2003 Starbucks introduced
the pumpkin spice latte, the PSL.
The pumpkin spice mix was saucified,
added to espresso and topped with whip cream.
Coffee drinkers went crazy for it
and it quickly became Starbucks'
top selling seasonal beverage.
Today, PSLs Twitter account has amassed
almost 100,000 followers.
And over the past 10 years,
tweets and means of sprung up
referring to basic girls sipping on pumpkin spice lattes.
It's become more than a spice.
It's an identity.
Okay. So guys, where are we doing brunch?
Oh no. I spilled some PSL on my UGGs.
Soon other companies started to catch on.
By 2013, sales for pumpkin flavored products
had reached nearly $350 million.
By 2015, more than $500 million.
So why are we so obsessed?
Well, that has to do with the seasonal nature
of the product.
We can't get it year round.
So we can get it, we want it,
and we want as much of it as we can handle.
It's called reactance theory. Look it up.
Today, pumpkin spice things exist completely independent
from the pumpkin.
Pumpkin spice vodka, pumpkin spice cereal,
pumpkin spice bath salts, pumpkin spice cat food,
pumpkin spice Pringles, pumpkin spice spam.
Pumpkin spice this, pumpkin spice,
there's a lot of pumpkin spice.
You could exist solely on pumpkin spice products.
I mean, if you wanted to.
And for those of you hating on pumpkin spice
know that you're not just hating on a spice mix.
You're hating on cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger
and American history.
PSL for life, baby.
("Star Spangled Banner")
Oh my God, it's cold.
It got so cold.
(chuckling)
Oh, well.
("Star Spangled Banner")