Leftist newspapers like The Washington Post dearly love a chance to remind us of how savage white Europeans committed genocide 500 years ago. Fox News media reporter Joseph Wulfsohn noted that on Friday, the Post brought the Debbie Downer history lesson to "pumpkin spice," just in time for the politically correct to beat their breasts about the October craze.
The headline:
Fall’s favorite spice blend has a violent history
Historians say the instance of “corporate genocide” was over nutmeg, without which there would be no Pumpkin Spice Latte.
The reporter was Maham Javaid, who grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She found a historian to really lay on a guilt trip about your latte:
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.
“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.
What we do without guilt trips from "food historians"? Sarah Wassberg Johnson is brought in for more lectures: “It just happens that the main spices in pumpkin spice are fraught with colonizer histories...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."
We reached it at the supermarket, where no one was beheaded on behalf of McCormick's spice factory in Baltimore.
Photos of Starbucks’s Pumpkin Spice Latte, however, remind Clulow 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.
He described the painting as the “ultimate symbol of stunningly opulent, globalized consumption in the 17th century.”
“It’s the same with these Starbucks lattes,” he said. “You’re getting stuff from all over the world and repackaging it for wealthy consumers without acknowledging the history of the ingredients.”
This came just days away from "Indigenous Peoples Day"/Columbus Day lectures, or maybe it's all the same campaign.
