Squash is perfect in all its forms, from decadent butternut to summery, fresh zucchini to easy-to-prepare delicata. I love it pureed into soups and stews, roasted with a sweet honey glaze and lightly grilled and placed on top of a bed of greens. But if there’s one thing I believe to be true about squash, it’s this: Spaghetti squash is the most delicious of the squashes. The stringy, fibrous texture, the sweet-but-mild flavor profile, the crisp of a just-slightly-burned strand of squash—it all brings me such acute joy that I force myself to ignore the $7 price tag on a single squash when it’s out of season.
But we’ve done spaghetti squash so, so dirty. Truthfully, the first time I’d ever heard of spaghetti squash, it was in the context of a diet-friendly recipe. “Replace your pasta with squash!” the recipe urged. I was scandalized. In my mind, nothing sounded sadder than pretending a particularly low-calorie vegetable is an apt imitation of pasta in all its glory. Wouldn’t the tomato sauce just turn into a watery mess? (I’ve tried these kinds of recipes—it does.)
Spaghetti squash, like so many other “healthy” foods, has been co-opted by diet culture. It’s treated not as a delicious ingredient in its own right but as a replacement for a better-but-off-limits ingredient. Let’s face it: It’s just not a good replacement for pasta in most recipes because it has a completely different flavor and texture than pasta does. That doesn’t mean that pasta is superior; it just means that different ingredients work well in different contexts.
In many cases, tomato sauce made from fresh tomatoes and olive oil works well with pasta because the pasta absorbs the flavor from the sauce, infusing each bite with those bright and umami flavors many of us look for when we go to our favorite Italian restaurants. Spaghetti squash, on the other hand, has plenty of moisture of its own, so it doesn’t really absorb pasta sauce in the same way. So why are we so desperate to turn spaghetti squash into something it isn’t?
I’m not saying that nobody should take steps to make their diet healthier for their specific dietary needs, and if eating more spaghetti squash and less pasta helps you do that, go for it. But personally, I enjoy my spaghetti squash a lot more when I don’t try to turn it into something else. I’ve found that preparing spaghetti squash like I do many other types of squash—usually by coating it in olive oil and spices (and sometimes Parmesan cheese) and cooking it in the oven—yields much better results than the questionable Alfredo sauce-smothered squash concoctions that you’ll come across on Pinterest.
I don’t eat spaghetti squash because it’s a “healthier” (which really just means lower-calorie) alternative to pasta. I eat it because I enjoy it in its own right, as a vegetable that has the potential to make my plate a bit more colorful, a bit more flavorful. But when we put “good” and “bad” labels on food according to whether we perceive that they will help or harm us in our attempts to achieve a socially acceptable body, it doesn’t just hurt our relationships with food—in many cases, it actually makes our food taste worse.
We deserve better. Spaghetti squash deserves better. So, please, for the sake of your own mental health, for the sake of breaking down weight-based social hierarchies, for the sake of a dinner that actually tastes good, don’t force yourself to eat bolognese-soaked spaghetti squash. There is a better way.
Samantha Maxwell is a food writer and editor based in Boston. Follow her on Twitter at @samseating.