Michael KnowlesMedia elites, particularly those on the Left, love to hate the pumpkin spice latte. In 2014, the left-wing website Vox Dot Com described the ubiquitous fall beverage as “an unctuous, pungent, saccharine brown liquid, equal parts dairy and diabetes, served in paper cups and guzzled down by the liter.” Just last week, the similarly inclined Washington Post blamed pumpkin spice for “war, genocide and slavery.” And yet, the PSL has become Starbucks’s most popular seasonal drink, with sales topping $200 million in the drink’s first decade of existence. Last year alone Starbucks sold 424 million cups.
Pumpkin spice pervades the autumnal marketplace, permeating consumer goods from canned ham to deodorant. The people’s love of pumpkin spice and snobbish elites’ derision of it suggest a subtle political reality: the pumpkin spice latte is America’s most conservative drink. While liberal, coastal white girls may constitute the most conspicuous purveyors of pumpkin spice, the flavor’s cultural connotations and the strong opinions they elicit reveal the drink’s profound conservatism.
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