Dear Pumpkin Flavoring Manufacturers

I love Fall.  I love the cool nights, I love Halloween, I love playoff baseball and the start of football season.   I love sitting on my deck wearing a light jacket and enjoying a cigar without sweating to death.   I love the fall crops I grow in my garden: fresh lettuce, spinach, and collard greens, garlic and onions.  I even added to the garden this year and grew something to pay off my love of Halloween: pumpkins.  Why grow pumpkins you ask?  Not to shove into every edible object I can imagine, I can tell you that.  I hate pumpkin foods.

When did our culture decide that there must be pumpkin flavoring in every food and beverage produced between September and December?   I blame pumpkin pie.  It became perfectly acceptable for people to each this mushy, mealy poor excuse for a sweet potato pie.  Then someone decided to try making pumpkin cupcakes, since it is fairly similar.  People kept making little concessions, adding little bits of pureed pumpkin into ravioli or butter.  Slowly everyone let their guard down around this foul tasting squash.  Everyone became complacent, and that's how, most likely after some mescaline fueled sinfest at an Albuquereque bordello/pancake house, we started putting pumpkin into beers, lattes, and other liquids it doesn't belong in. 

Suddenly, you can't buy a damned thing that doesn't taste like pumpkin, or rot melon as I like to call it.  You can't escape it, and everyone thinks it is just great.  They sit around smearing pumpkin paste in their hair while drinking Punk'in Ale and talking about how good this gourd loving life is.  I have advocated for years to have this happen with maple flavor, but the damned Pumpkin constituency has drowned out any hope I have have of sweet domination.

Please allow me to eat a regular cupcake or bagel in October.  Allow me to have some modicum of enjoyment.  Just because I don't like eating pumpkin doesn't make me odd, and it doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to eat anything.