Even canned orange gourds have Pinterest pages

The other day I noticed that cans of pumpkin tout their Pinterest page. I get that it’s potentially useful marketing for the company and useful for consumers to find ways to use up extra cans of pumpkin once we’re past the traditional pumpkin pie season.

But still, it gives me pause. This same can still has the same recipe that my mother always used to make her annual pumpkin pies, which is comforting. But where Mom just got the one bit of information from the can she needed, we’re now led into a bold new world of choices. And in typical Pinterest fashion, not a few choices, but an overwhelming array of recipes in categories like Power Drinks and Game Time Snacks. Um, really?

How is this bad? I guess it isn’t, technically. But in my mother’s day, the only aspirational guilt inputs were from a handful of what were then called women’s magazines, extension service pamphlets and other club ladies. A whole wide world of choices wasn’t available to her, but she had fewer possibilities to weigh on her mind. Potential and opportunity trade both ways.

Don’t get me wrong. I love me some Pinterest, which essentially lets me have highly organized visual bookmarks and waste lots of time that I used to spend looking at catalogs. You know, the I’m too tired to do anything stage where all I can do is look at pictures.

Meanwhile, the Barnes & Noble is closing downtown. How are these two related? Well, in a world where you can get a staggering array of recipes online from sites far fancier and more useful than this one, do people buy as many cookbooks anymore? (And if they do, they now all have to look like bound versions of blog sites with way more photos than you need showing you how to drizzle olive oil, again.)

Obviously there are other factors at work here, like lease negotiations, but certainly book stores face competition not just from Internet booksellers, but from the information available on the Internet itself. Yes, some people still buy travel guidebooks, but maps? Not so much when Google Now or Siri can talk you through turn by turn. Some commenter on the store closing article blamed people getting e-books at the library. Since e-books are likely to cut into sales of hard copies, regardless of where they are obtained, I’m not sure how libraries are at fault, but whatever. (Actually, I’ve purchased several cookbooks after first checking them out of the library to make sure they cooked as good as they looked.)

All I know is that while spending my lunch hours browsing through cookbooks at Barnes & Noble, I didn’t feel overwhelmed. I just wished I could buy more of them. But instead, books force you to make a selection, to commit to just one thing. Kind of the anti-Internet. And that wasn’t so bad.

That said, Pumpkin Maple Bacon Spread from the fine folks at Libby’s, anyone? It's now pinned on my Apps I'm apt to make board.

Rant mode off.