Celebrity Chefs Who Hate The Pumpkin Spice Trend

Once summer is here, can pumpkin spice season be far behind? Seriously, every year Starbucks and the like seem to push out their pumpkin spice offerings earlier and earlier and let it linger on later and later, so pumpkin spice season now apparently runs from August to January. That's not a season, that's half the year. And each half-year, pumpkin spice flavoring is applied to an increasingly ridiculous range of products. Pumpkin spice Spam? We only wish we were joking.

If only the food marketers would get a clue — this trend is way past its prime, like a jack-o-lantern on the porch the week after Thanksgiving. If you need any further evidence that pumpkin spice is so over, it's come in for quite the dissing from several celebrity chefs over the years.

The late Anthony Bourdain was one of the earliest to weigh in — back in 2015, he told People, "I think pumpkin spice is disgusting. I certainly don't want it in my coffee." By 2016 he was pulling no punches during a Reddit AMA (via Eater), proclaiming, "I would like to see the pumpkin spice craze drowned in its own blood. Quickly." A year later on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Martha Stewart weighed in with her opinion that pumpkin spice-flavored everything was basically for basic b*tches (via Cosmopolitan). Ouch.

Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, was a bit more ladylike in her mild 2018 diss of the ubiquitous PSL, merely remarking on Today, "I like coffee to taste like coffee." And while Chopped judge Alex Guarnaschelli admitted that she actually did enjoy PSLs in a 2018 interview with MyRecipes, provided they're "basically pumpkin pie in a mug," by pumpkin spice season (remember, that's August) of 2019, this celebrity chef was tweeting, "I'm trying to remember when pumpkin spice was special."

Everyone's trying to remember, Alex, but pumpkin spice is definitely nothing to get excited about anymore. Can't we all get together and crown a new fall flavor? Perhaps something like the versatile sweet potato — equally good in fries or pies, and you can even make it into a latte. Heck, Starbucks has already got a sweet potato latte on the menu in Korea. Now that would be something to get excited about... and sweet potato might even make a pretty decent Spam flavor, too. Somebody tell the marketers. Or no, don't. Nobody needs sweet potato dog cologne or fish bait, after all.