It’s technically still summer, but we’ve all reluctantly accepted that it is pumpkin spice season, when it seems like we’re incapable of eating or drinking anything that doesn’t taste like synthetic cinnamon and nutmeg. Every year, the number of pumpkin spice products reproduces like a Mogwai beside a spilled venti PSL, but this might be the worst offender. No, it’s not the Nature’s Path Gluten-Free Pumpkin Spice Oatmeal, the White Pumpkin Pie M&M’s, or the CVS-brand pumpkin spice throat lozenges. It’s pumpkin spice pizza, a collection of words that should never appear in beside each other in a sentence.
Villa Italian Kitchen is to blame for this, the same New Jersey-based chain that was responsible for Alternative Facts pizza. (Remember when that seemed hilarious? Like, when we thought that things would be so different right now? WE WERE SO FOOLISH.) Anyway, Villa’s seasonal pie starts with a regular hand-stretched slab of pizza dough, and then everything goes wrong from there. Pumpkin pie filling is spread across the dough—the definition of crimes against carbohydrates—which is then covered with mozzarella cheese and baked. After that, the pizza is again doused with pumpkin pie filling, just in case it forgot that it was humiliated not ten minutes ago.
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“Pumpkin Spice is undeniably the most popular flavor of fall. As such, we wanted to slice up our piece of the pie,” Villa Italian Kitchen spokesperson Brian Lowe told MUNCHIES. “We thought, what could be better than combining the popularity of Pumpkin Spice with pizza? So, after a few R&D sessions, we landed on the perfect Pumpkin Spice Pizza balance. It’s a magical place where all the deliciousness of pizza meets the flavors of pumpkin spice.”
READ MORE: Fuck Pumpkin Spice
No, Brian. None of this is magical. Not the pizza, not the cough drops and not a can of sprayable pumpkin spice flavoring, which is also a thing that exists. This soul-numbing $7 spray can is sold by Simply Beyond Foods, a company that I sincerely hope has attracted the attention of INTERPOL. “Treat yourself to all those flavors, but without the gritty texture or muddy appearance of dusty, ground spices,” Simply Beyond encourages. Yes, you now have the power to turn anything into its pumpkin spice counterpart, because nothing matters anymore.
“Have we reached peak pumpkin spice?” Lowe asked, rhetorically. “You bet your nutmeg.”
Sigh. Anhedonia tastes a lot like allspice.
