‘Tis the season when affluent White women switch from Zoloft to pumpkin spice, so here is a pedantic fact to get the conversation started.

Pumpkins are just a variety of squash.

This guy teaches me food stuff on Twitter/X.

He adds,

That’s legal, and FDA has said so in writing since 1938. Their compliance guide tells canners the agency will not take action against the word pumpkin on anything made from golden fleshed, sweet squash. Pumpkin has no real botanical definition and it’s a word for certain types of squash.

Since I am media literate and savvy, I hold to the Chicago newsroom adage:

“If your mom says she loves you, check it out.”

That means that no single source is unimpeachable, and should be verified with other facts.  With my mom, you could tell she loved you, even when she didn’t like you.

To get a second opinion, I went to Wikipedia because that was run by a woman who was trained to use mass media to destabilize unfriendly foreign governments.  She runs NPR now, so you can trust her.

A pumpkin is a cultivated winter squash in the genus Cucurbita. The term is most commonly applied to round, orange-colored squash varieties, but does not possess a scientific definition.

Wanting to learn more about pumpkins, I found that the US Department of Agriculture maintains a “SNAP-Ed” library of nutritional resources intended to educate people in the SNAP program. 

I am not convinced that welfare queens and Somali food stamp pirates are going to seek guidance about healthy food choices and general wellness from a government website, but they’ve been doing this for 30 years and the site is engaging with useful information.

Here is their pumpkin page:

See, that’s interesting.  I wouldn’t have thought to put pumpkins in pancakes, but if you find yourself at the International House of Pancakes, there are probably all manner of exotic pancake variations.

That exhausts my interest in pumpkins, and I must get back to managing my beagle.  Sparky currently looks like this:

It’s 10 am, and all Sparky has accomplished so far is to go outside to take a whiz, and to move to a different couch. 

Before judging him too harshly, keep in mind that it took fifteen years for the management team at the International House of Pancakes to come up with the IHOP acronym.