The perilous whiteness of … pumpkins?

Globe and Mail ^ | 10/8/2016 | Margaret Wente

[RightGeek]

Hey, you! You, with the Starbucks pumpkin-spiced latte in your hand. That ridiculous concoction – with its fluffiness, lack of substance, and triviality – is the ultimate expression of white privilege. So shame on you.

I learned about the true meaning of the pumpkin-spiced latte in a scholarly paper, called The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins. It was peer-reviewed and published in a genuine academic journal. Lisa Jordan Powell, its lead author, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia. “Starbucks PSLs are products of coffee shop culture, with its gendered and racial codes,” it warns. They make up just one part of the “pumpkin entertainment complex, whose multiple manifestations continue the entanglements of pumpkins, social capital, race, and place.”

Ms. Powell (who did not respond to an offer to comment on her paper) is merely one of countless academics toiling in the fertile field of race and gender studies. I don’t mean to pick on her in particular. Like everybody else, she must publish or perish. They churn out this stuff like Halloween candy. We pay for it.

Vast tracts of the social sciences have gone insane. If you doubt it, I urge you to check out New Real Peer Review, a Twitter feed whose purpose is to expose the absurdity of what passes for scholarly research. It’s run by a small team of anonymous academics who fear their careers will suffer if people know who they are. They have no shortage of material. Their greatest hit to date is a piece claiming that glaciology – the study of glaciers – is misogynist, and that we need to “feminize” it. (Some people thought that paper was a hoax, but sadly it was not.)

[Black Agnes]

Pumpkin/winter squash filling consistency depends on both the variety grown and the season in which it was grown as well.

I regularly grow ~4-500lbs for family use. If it’s first baked in a dish (having cleaned out the seed cavity and the first 1/2” of ‘stringy stuff’) of water, face down, covered with foil for several hours at about 300F, scooped out and processed in a food processor or blender, it’s superb.

I make ‘breakfast cake’ for my family year round with it. It’s got a lot of vitamins and is ‘free food’ at my house since we have the space to grow it easily. Several cups of the finished squash + a cup of vanilla greek yogurt, a dozen eggs (we have chickens) + baking powder, flour, milk, cinnamon/nutmeg/ginger (ginger is also easy to grow if you have enough heat units, a great shady spot, and some large ornamental containers) and etc and then bake.

Toasted with butter it’s yummy with coffee or milk. And way healthier than ‘poptarts’ or other junk.

It’s funny that ‘pumpkin’ is ‘white people’ stuff or something. They were grown by Native Americans for thousands of years before the ‘white man’ showed up.