Peeps: A Bad Candy For All Seasons

Mr. Stelter, our late, sainted chemistry teacher from high school, was known for his "discrepant events" -- flamboyant demonstrations where he would, say, take a cattle prod to his belt buckle to explain properties of electricity. One day, to demonstrate something about high-heat reactions which I have since completely forgotten, he set up a reaction that would melt iron before our eyes.

He put all the necessary chemicals and raw iron in a heavy ceramic crucible on a ring stand, positioned the ring stand over a trash basket filled with water, and then, because it was around Easter, he placed a Marshmallow Peep on the chemicals, and ignited them.

There was a huge plume of flame. The crucible broke. The iron sizzled through the water, melting through the bottom of the wastebasket.

Throughout all of this, THE PEEP DID NOT BURN. Didn't even catch fire. Didn't even swell, like a normal marshmallow.

I've always been fond of the little buggers despite this saddening demonstration that my digestive tract is probably not up to the fight. Peeps combine two of the best states of sugar into a fun-to-behead chicken-shaped dollop. But as we age, we must all eventually come to reckoning on the Peeps question: they're evil, no avoiding it.

They just got more evil. Today, while looking for my other favorite extruded food (Combos) in a Duane Reade, I discovered that Peeps are trying to make headway into a market that is not theirs by birthright. Witness:

The name "Peeps Cutouts" suggests that there may have been trouble with standards of accurate labelling. Calling them "Peeps Gingerbread Men" would not only be gender-inaccurate (gingerbread women hold up half of the cellophane-packaged sky, here, with garish Red #3 mouths) but also contradict the "Holiday Cookie Flavored, Artificially Flavored" label indicating there's no cookies in 'em. "Cookie Cutters" would be even further from the truth, and "Gingerbread Shapes" would still be wrong for terrible reasons, not immediately obvious, which I'm about to explain.

I'm not sure what part of "Flavored" didn't register. I should have turned back right then; instead, I took a package home.

The odor that hit me as I opened the package set off a whole new set of warning bells. Instead of the pleasant spice-and-molasses smell suggested by the gingerbread-man theme, they smelled salty and greasy.

I played with the color balance of these shots for fifteen minutes, but the pictures here just don't do justice to the horrible jaundiced cafe-au-lait color they've dyed these things. Even in the centers -- there's no angel-white center to these Peeps, like there are in the bunnies'n'chickens.

They do, however, present gruesome siamese-twin-separation opportunities that normal Peeps don't.

After a few minutes of chewing, it became clear exactly what JustBorn company had pulled. Making overtures about gingerbread and possibly coffee turned out to be the flavor equivalent of accosting my senses, stuffing them in a bag, spinning them around until dizzy, driving them around the streets of Boston and ultimately leaving them on a dark smelly wharf beside a fish cannery.

No ginger. No molasses. No coffee. Only a nauseating artificial homage to butter cookies, laced with nasty spikes of Red #3. It was like gnawing a Strawberry Shortcake doll. It was like belching after gagging down a bag of Butter Popcorn Jelly Bellys. It was unspeakably awful, so overdone as to completely ruin the furtive glee of pure sugar consumption that is the sole attraction of Peeps.

The lesson here: Don't succumb to the lure of Holiday Peeps. In fact, there's a broader lesson: never give in to a company's attempts to get you to buy hip, daring new products in their line, whether you have loyalty to them or not. it's all artificial cookie flavoring and propaganda.

well, naw. the real lesson is it's fun to make faces at your digital camera.

Posted by Gus at November 29, 2001 10:09 PM