The Indestructible Nature of Peeps
Just a fun little "fluff" piece for your holiday weekend
Recently, in the middle of an exceedingly average workday, I received a text message from my friend (and Substack subscriber) Kalea. This immediately caught my attention. Although I see Kalea pretty frequently, our text correspondence is usually pretty straightforward, primarily based on hashing out details for concrete, in-person plans. Thinking that maybe she was looking for someone to watch her two little dogs over the weekend or something along those lines, I opened up my messaging app and found this:
Since the age of 9, I haven’t really been able to stomach sugary cereals. So naturally, I was repulsed by the concept of Peeps cereal. While I have yet to actually try Peeps cereal for myself, most of the reviews that I encountered online only cemented my initial instinct to keep it as far away from my body as possible. Jamelle Bouie of Serious Eats describes the experience of swallowing a bite as “like getting an oyster down my mouth, except if that oyster was caked in confectioner’s sugar”.
I’m not really surprised to hear that this product is far from the pinnacle of what cereal can be. But the more time I’ve had to ruminate, the more I’ve found myself pondering over the nature of these little marshmallow chicks. Who IS eating these? Does anyone actually like it? Is demand for the Peep so high that it justifies an entire Peep-based cereal?
The story behind the iconic Easter candy actually begins with a Jewish immigrant by the name of Sam Born. In 1910, the nineteen-year-old boarded a ship to America in hopes of escaping the political turmoil and rampant antisemitism that defined the dying days of Tsarist Russia. By the time he was twenty-five, he was an established candy maker, having earned a key to the city of San Francisco for the invention of a machine that inserted sticks into lollipops. Eventually, he opened up shop in Brooklyn and confections flew off the shelves throughout the 20s. Even through the tumult of the Great Depression, Born managed to stay afloat by relocating to Bethlehem, PA.
Thanks to his talent and apparent business acumen, Born acquired several different candy competitors over the course of his career. One of them was the Rodda Candy Company. Not a whole lot of information survives concerning what went on at Rodda’s. However, we do know that in a small area at the back of the factory, women worked hard handcrafting marshmallow chicks with pastry tubes.
As charming as this sounds, every single one of Rodda’s chicks took about 27 hours to make. Realizing how incredibly inefficient this practice would be to maintain, the Born family set to work finding a less strenuous way to create marshmallow chicks. By 1954, the process was streamlined and it became possible to create a batch of birds in just 6 minutes.
Today, about 5.5 million Peeps are manufactured per day, which adds up to around a couple of billion marshmallows per year. They’ve diverged into a variety of shapes to fit every season (jack-o-lanterns for Halloween, evergreens for Christmas) and are available in all sorts of bright colors. Different flavors have been developed over the years, ranging from acceptable (chocolate dipped, strawberry) to arguably horrifying (pancakes and syrup, blue raspberry, fruit punch).
But the madness hardly ends there. If you head over to your local Big Lots right now, you can purchase Peeps brand foaming hand soap or a 10-pack of Peeps flavored lip balm. There are Peeps jellybeans, lollipops, milk chocolate rabbits, even lemonade. Last year, the confectioners behind Peeps partnered with Pepsi and 7-11 to create limited addition marshmallow-infused beverages. Their likeness has been plastered on LED lights, mugs, little girl’s hair accessories and charm bracelets. Peeps have jumped on the corporate Pride bandwagon, with one t-shirt donning rainbow-colored bunnies and the slogan reads “INSIDE WE’RE ALL THE SAME”.
I’ve stumbled upon no less than three dozen different Peep plushes. Build-a-Bear allows you to stuff your own Peep rabbit. You can even buy a chick-shaped “wristie” accessory to go along with it, even though the rabbits themselves do not have arms. This is not even taking into consideration fan-made merchandise available on sites like Etsy.
But why?
For some, nostalgia plays a large role in Peep appeal. They are reminders of the days that someone once packed an Easter basket up especially for you, of the joy a sugar-crusted candy could bring when your stomach could handle just about anything. But that alone isn’t enough to really explain the sheer volume of Peeps affiliated merchandise floating around. Nor do I think that the widespread admiration for the Peep has anything to do with the taste or composition of the product (though Peeps brand manager Caitlin Servian does claim that “love” is the secret ingredient included in every individual batch of Peeps)
Instead, it’s likely the two unassuming wax “eyes” that do a lot of the heavy lifting for this confection.
While they may seem like little more than an afterthought, they are the magic element to the equation that transmutes amorphous blobs of whipped sugar into something adorable. These two small dots make such a massive impact because of pareidolia, the practice of endowing meaning to a meaningless pattern/stimuli. Oftentimes, this manifests in “seeing” faces in inanimate objects. From an evolutionary standpoint, the ability to recognize and interpret facial features plays a crucial role in everything from identifying predators to facilitating social bonds. Over time, humans have become so sensitive to detecting common facial patterns that our brains are sometimes triggered by “false positives”. Sometimes, we can’t help but spot details that look vaguely human in clouds and Rorschach tests – even when we logically know that they’re nothing more than aerosolized particles and inkblots.
Because we’re all born prone to seeing faces where there aren’t any, two little specks are all it takes to trigger some of the same neural mechanisms that fire off in our brains when interpreting expressions. But it doesn’t end there. Peeps are engineered to fit our natural conceptions of cute. The small snouts (or in this case, beaks), large eyes, high foreheads, and retreating chins of each marshmallow bird are features that prompt a hardwired caregiving response in humans.1 2
From there, it becomes almost impossible not to anthropomorphize a bit. There’s a reason why people have claimed that eyes are the window to the soul since bible times. Eyes play a major role in conveying thought and emotion, and when a Peep meets your gaze, it’s easy to feel as if something deeper is going on in that conglomerate of collagen and corn syrup.
So that might be why we feel a certain warmth and affection towards the Peep that may not be able to conjure for, say, a Snickers bar (even if we can collectively agree that Snickers are superior to Peeps).
Unfortunately for the Peep, its indisputable allure may also be the reason behind a particularly bizarre compulsion that drives many of us to violently destroy them.
If you are among the 65% of people who feel immediately compelled to take a big bite out of your Peep’s head, take comfort in the fact that you’re not a complete monster. Or, at the very least, you’re likely not any more sadistic than the general population. Peeps have been the popular subject of numerous gruesome experiments since at least the mid-90s. A senior lecturer at Emory University’s chemistry department has conducted tests on the durability of Peeps for years.
A selection of the abuses I’ve witnessed these candy birds endure include:
This extremely weird phenomenon may have something to do with cute aggression, a superficial impulse some of us feel to crush, bite, pinch, or squeeze a thing we perceive as cute. Some scientists hypothesize that this is a means of regulating hormones and preventing us from drowning in our own good feelings.
Of course, there could be some deeper psychological reasoning behind this behavior. Maybe it’s as simple as the pleasure stemming from deconstructing a marshmallow outweighing the pleasure that comes from the cloying sweetness.
Love them, hate them, or avoid them altogether, the Peep has endured for years to come. The verdict’s still out on whether their survival has to do more so with some deeply engrained child-rearing instinct or because nothing but fire and the nastiest of protein solvents seems to have much of an impact on their structural integrity. Regardless of the reasoning, one thing is certain – for years to come, these strange little creatures will remain as much a sign of spring in the US as birdsong, baseball, and seasonal allergies.
Whether or not Peeps fall into your holiday routine, I hope that you are enjoying whatever your spring celebration of choice happens to be! Feel free to drop any additional Peep-related carnage you may have on hand in the comments!
This also mostly applies to the popular bunny-shaped Peep, although they’re a bit more two-dimensional than the classic chick.
To be fair, the fact that Peeps are so cute may be due to chance more so than design – Konrad Lorenz, the ethologist responsible for initially identifying “cute” features was a bonafide Nazi in the 1930s and 40s. I can’t imagine that Sam Born (who was Jewish) would have looked to Lorenz for inspiration when perfecting the Peep.
hahahahaha.I just demolished some peeps this weekend.