The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins

Abstract

This article examines the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in the contemporary United States. Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte, a widely circulated essay in McSweeney’s on “Decorative Gourd Season,” pumpkins in aspirational lifestyle magazines, and the reality television show Punkin Chunkin provide entry points into whiteness–pumpkin connections. Such analysis illuminates how class, gender, place, and especially race are employed in popular media and marketing of food and flavor; it suggests complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race. Pumpkins in popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places. Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography. When considered vis-à-vis violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins, these analyses point toward the perils of equating pumpkins and whiteness.

本文检视美国当代与南瓜有关的象徵白人性。星巴克的南瓜香料拿铁，麦史云尼（McSweeney）广为流传的文章〈装饰南瓜季节〉，渴望的生活风格杂志中的南瓜，以及“投掷南瓜”的实境电视秀，提供了白人性—南瓜连结的切入点。此般分析，描绘阶级、性别、地方，特别是种族如何在大众媒体与食物和味觉行销中被使用；本文指出食物、休閒、劳动、怀旧和种族之间的复杂互动。大众文化中的南瓜，同时揭露了“乡村相对于城市”地方的当代种族与阶级识别。累积批判的、关係性与脉络化的分析，包含如同南瓜一般天真无害的事物，指向人性与地理的食物研究。当面对面考量纳入南瓜的暴力与行动主义时，这些分析指向了将南瓜等同于白人性的危险性。

Este artículo examina la blancura simbólica asociada con las calabazas en los Estados Unidos contemporáneos. El latte de calabaza con especias de Starbucks, un ensayo ampliamente circulado en McSweeney sobre la “Estación del Calabacín Decorativo”, las calabazas de los magazines de estilos de vida con aspiraciones, y el programa de televisión de estilo reality denominado Punkin Chunkin, proporcionan los puntos de entrada a las conexiones calabaza-blancura. Tal análisis ilumina cómo la clase, el género, el lugar y especialmente la raza son empleados en los medios populares y en el mercadeo de comida y sabor; ese análisis sugiere un complicado intercambio entre comida, ocio, trabajo, nostalgia y raza. En la cultura popular las calabazas también revelan las codificaciones contemporáneas de raza y clase que enfrentan los lugares rurales contra los urbanos. La acumulación de análisis críticos, relacionales y contextuales, que incluyen cosas tan aparentemente inocuas como las calabazas, marcan el camino hacia estudios de los alimentos en las humanidades y en geografía. Al observar violencia y activismo incorporando calabazas juntos, tales análisis apuntan a los riesgos de equiparar calabazas y blancura.

Key Words:

• food
• gender
• popular media
• race and place
• whiteness

• 关键词：食物
• 性别
• 大众媒体
• 种族与地方
• 白人性

• alimento
• género
• medios populares
• raza y lugar
• blancura

Notes

¹ Between swimming pool parties in McKinney, Texas, playgrounds in Detroit, Skittles and hoodies in Florida, and prayer groups in Charleston, the annus horribilis of 2014 blended into 2015 as violence against communities of color continued and people searched for language to express the systemic racism.

² Wazana Tompkins (2012, 2) warned against the “unending stream of single-commodity histories” that are unreflective of politics, a warning we have taken to heart.

³ Sax (2014) did not explicitly discuss the pumpkin spice phenomenon, but it bears all the characteristics of what he called “food trends” shaped by “tastemakers.” He argued that “Food became a fashion item, a status symbol, and a means of exerting power” in the distant past, but that we live in a cultural moment in which “trends are springing up quicker and growing faster than they ever did before” (xiii–xiv). At their best, he concluded, food trends are democratic; at their worst, “They may start out as individual expressions of imagination, but ultimately they become victims of a herd mentality” (282).

⁴ Also, it is curious that both the Pumpkin Riot and this kerfuffle over basicness happened not just in the same season or same month, but over the same three days.

⁵ Privilege might well earn the title of the most contentious word of the year; one of the classic takes on it is McIntosh (1988).

⁶ Although Ellis focused mostly on European and U.S. coffee shop cultures, the demonstrations of whiteness encapsulated by Starbucks patronage might extend to other countries and continents as well. For instance, Spracklen (2013), in his Whiteness and Leisure, argued, “In late modernity, drinking a latte has become a marker of whiteness, Westernization, and bourgeois sophistication. In developing countries such as South Africa and Kenya, local drinking practices have been swapped by the new elites in those countries for the taste of Americanized coffee. The new black economic elites in South Africa and Kenya have adopted white, Western, middle-class styles—through going to Starbucks they are becoming white in the same way the black political elites have adopted golf clubs in Kenya” (143).

⁷ In an additional ironic twist, the days that followed brought journalists pointing out that the statement was untrue. Despite the assertion of Budweiser VP Brian Perkins that “This is not an attack on craft beer, this is not an attack on competition … The only other beer that we reference in the spot is a fabricated, ludicrous flavor combination of pumpkin peach ale,” in fact Anheuser-Busch had recently acquired Elysian Brewery, a Seattle craft brewery that features a pumpkin peach ale called “Gourdia on our Mind” (Schultz 2015).

⁸ Agreeing with Smith, Rogue Ales planted its own pumpkin farm in Independence, Oregon, for the brewing of its Pumpkin Patch Ale. The brewery Web site emphasizes the farm connections and actual pumpkin content of the beer: “We pick our pumpkins fresh from the patch, load them on our truck and drive them 77 miles to our Newport, Oregon brewery, roast and then pitch them into the brew kettle. From patch to batch, Rogue grows pumpkin patch beer” (Rogue 2014).

⁹ For examples of unexpected products with pumpkin spice flavor, see Huang (2015). In addition, a viral Internet joke, believed by many, about pumpkin-flavored condoms worked precisely because of the proliferation of such products (see Mullins 2014).

¹⁰ Data about shares come from statistics on the original post; the mug is no longer for sale at McSweeney’s but images of it are available (Complex 2012). Searching for “decorative gourd season” on YouTube in Summer 2015 yielded fifteen videos with a combined viewership of more than 11,000, including one video of “outtakes” from filming the essay (YouTube 2015).

¹¹ “Thug” language in food exploded in controversies in 2014, when the authors of the popular vegan blog, thugkitchen.com, published a cookbook and started doing bookstore appearances, at which point the public realized they were a white Hollywood couple (see Anonymous 2014; Francis 2014; Merwin 2014).

¹² As noted by numerous rural geographers, ideas and images surrounding the rural idyll are largely constructed in opposition to the rural. Regardless of the blurring of distinctions between rural and urban over the past half-century, these ideas and images of the idyllic countryside have remained pervasive in U.S. and British popular culture (see, e.g., Bunce 1994; D. Bell 2006; Cloke 2006). Scholars have worked with the problematic racial coding and power structures attached to different types of idyllic rural landscapes, for example Finney’s (2014) work on African Americans and the “Great Outdoors” and Daniel’s (2013) work on African American farmers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

¹³ Although today “Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater” is a harmless nursery rhyme, Ott (2012) showed it began as an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slur, meant to embarrass people too poor to eat a wider range of foods and thus dependent on the humble pumpkin (74). Without delving as deeply into the race and class associations of the decorative gourd as it now functions in popular media as we are here, Ott specifically discussed the jack-o-lantern and the “long history of employing the vegetable to critique human behavior” (6).

¹⁴ The show has at various times aired on Discovery and the Science Channel. As the latter is owned by the former, the sensibility has remained the same. See Science Channel (n.d.-a) for today’s version and Science Channel (n.d.-b) for the game. There is no standardized terminology for these competitions. Some refer to it as chunking, others chucking; at times they drop the g; pumpkin or punkin variously appear. Pumpkin moonshine, by the way, is not a food, but is merely a game made by aiming propelled pumpkins at a still.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Jordan Powell

LISA JORDAN POWELL is a postdoctoral fellow appointed jointly in the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada; and the Department of Geography at the University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC, V2S 7M7, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include agriculture, food, resource extraction, and agriburbia, particularly in the contexts of landscape, rural studies, and environmental history.

Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

ELIZABETH S. D. ENGELHARDT is the John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599–3520. E-mail: [email protected]. Her interdisciplinary research interests include Southern cultures, gender, food studies in the humanities, feminist theories, Appalachian studies, public humanities, oral history practices, and the intersections of race, class, and gender in American literature and society.