Every Easter, along with pastel rompers and ridiculously ornate hats, comes another springtime scourge: the Peep. Like clockwork, in the middle of February, when the drugstores pack up the last of the 50% off Valentine's candy from the seasonal aisle, they appear with their jaunty colors and baby animal shapes – like the blackest clouds from an April shower ready to rain on my parade.
Well, not everyone loves this sugary marshmallow treat, and I am one of them. In fact, I will go as far as to declare that I hate Peeps.
Yes, they are one of the "Easter Bunny's" favorites and have festooned plastic woven baskets of Christian children looking for a sugar fix for as long as I can remember, but they're just not as delicious as everyone makes them out to be. Maybe it has something to do with the taste or the consistency, neither of which agree with me, and I have a sweet tooth that is any underemployed dentist's dream.
It's the sugary coating around the marshmallow that really does it: a combination of crunch and solidly sponge, like biting into a bunny shaped chunk of that pink slime stuff we've been hearing so much about, after it's been rolled around in sidewalk grit.
Can we just stop fooling ourselves that marshmallow is a flavor? Well, it's a flavor, but, like the last syllable of the word, it's mellow. It's nothing to write home about. It's just gooey and sticky and kind of like biting into a really soft pencil eraser. Gross!
What makes Peeps even worse is the nostalgic reverence that everyone has for them. Like somehow eating one is like breaking off a piece of childhood itself. As if you can reclaim the joy of bounding out of bed on a sunny Sunday morning to find far too much sugary food waiting for you as a gift from a fictitious animal, which was really just a bribe to get you to sit still long enough for your mother to force you into stiff formal clothing and convince you to sit through an hour of mass. You cannot reclaim that, and why would you want to?
The design has also become iconic and revered, like the bright spray-painted colors and the semi-abstract bunny and duck shapes are edible Jeff Koons sculptures or some sort of mid-century mod masterpiece that even grumpy Don Draper couldn't resist.
I say humbug to all that. They're just candy – and gross candy at that. The reason that you can't buy them year round, other than their obvious seasonal appeal, is that if you could have a Peep anytime you wanted it, by the time every February rolled around, people would already remember how disgusting they are. But like a restaurant that is impossible to get reservations for, everyone raves about the Peep because it is so hard to come by.
These are not Girl Scout cookies, where the draconian unavailability makes something that is actually good even more desirable. The bright color, crazy shape, and lack of availability are just an illusion to sell the masses a barely edible slice of the past.
I say no thank you, this year and every year. I mean, it's not like a Peep is as good as a Cadbury Crème Egg anyway.
