Brace yourselves: The season of pumpkin spice everything is here.
Everyone is familiar with this fall favorite, the excited (and growing) lines at Starbucks, and the accompanying onslaught of Instagram pictures. But here’s the history: Starbucks began developing the flavor in early 2003. With their other seasonal drinks doing so well, Starbucks began searching for something new to add to the sugary collection.
Starbucks rolled out 10 new drinks to test. The chocolate and caramel flavors were the most popular, and pumpkin spice actually fell around the middle of the spectrum. But with no other competing pumpkin drinks or foods on the market, Starbucks chose to further develop pumpkin spice. After testing multiple combinations of pumpkin and spice, the official Pumpkin Spice Latte was presented in 2003. Surprisingly though, the drink hasn’t contained any pumpkin in past years. This year however, there has been talk about adding pumpkin to the iconic recipe.
Since its introduction to the market, Starbucks claims to have sold about 200 million Pumpkin Spice Lattes. Pumpkin spice has permeated our entire food and drink culture. Dunkin Donuts now serves pumpkin flavors, M&M has pumpkin flavored candies, there are shampoos and soaps and candles, and now various chocolate brands sell the popular flavor. There are even pumpkin spice Pringles.
But what about the cultural obsession with Pumpkin Spice Lattes – or PSL as the Internet has so lovingly dubbed it? The PSL is the essential drink in “basic” culture. As many of you probably know, basic culture is just normative culture. In May of this year, Dictionary.com updated their definition of basic to include “a person, especially a female, who is boringly predictable and unoriginal.”
The current trends linked with basic culture today have negative connotations and are predominantly wrapped around Ugg boots, Instagram selfies, novel-worthy hashtags, Starbucks, and leggings: the epitome of the “basic white girl.”
Someone who is basic is almost always a she. New York Magazine writes, “The woman who calls another woman basic ends up implicitly endorsing two things she probably wouldn’t sign up for if they were spelled out for her: a male hierarchy of culture and the belief that the self is an essentially surface-level formation.”
Calling someone basic is one of the most non-committal insults in the book. It’s not as cruel as other digs, and as New York Magazine says, “it derives its power from the knowledge that if you can recognize someone or something as basic, you probably, yourself, aren’t it.”
But at its essence, basic culture is all about fitting in. It’s about conforming to a defined physical presentation and identity because it’s comfortable. Our very own school, Colorado College, has its own “basic” culture. Maybe it’s not about Starbucks and Ugg boots, but consider how many Nalgene bottles plastered with stickers you see around campus, the outdoorsy attitude, and lots and lots of Patagonia.
But we aren’t just who we present ourselves to be. Just because someone decided to only buy brand-name clothing does not mean that they are brand-name clothing, just like you are not the summation of all of your Nalgene water bottle stickers. Nothing like this can truly encompass who you are as a person.
So whether you’re buying that Pumpkin Spice Latte because all of your friends are, or because you just really like it, enjoy it.