Food critic reviews Peeps' new Hot Tamales and Fruit Loops flavors
Marshmallow Peeps new and old will be gracing Easter baskets this year. Credit: Spencer Vogel
"PEEPS® is back and better than ever!" cried a news release announcing the triumphant return of the candy world’s answer to spray foam insulation, minus the annoying fossil-fuel aftertaste. Owing to the pandemic, the Pennsylvania factory that makes them abruptly closed last March, severely disrupting the Peeps global supply chain, which is why you saw no blobby ghosts at Halloween, no spongy kelly green Christmas trees.
After a period in which nary a peep was heard from the company, the chick-squirting machines resumed production in time for the Easter rush, whereupon Peeps came under attack from PETA for, I assumed, the company’s inhumane overcrowding of bunnies under cellophane. Nope. The marshmallow creations are made with gelatin derived from pigs, which is to say that — cruel irony alert — the bodies of real animals are being boiled in order to create fake ones. At a company named Just Born.
PETA hoped the pandemic would lead a chastened Peepstate to mend its ways. Nope again. Just Born pivoted instead to franchise expansion. Not having strolled down the candy aisle recently, I expected to see only Peeps of old, boxes of pastel-colored chicks with beady brown eyes made of carnauba wax. (Yes, there’s some in your garage.) For decades, bunnies of similar import stood shoulder-to-shoulder with military precision, their identical blank faces a silent commentary on the evils of groupthink, silent because they have no mouths. These dystopian, "Handmaid’s Tale" harsh-mallows maintained their iron grip till the early years of this century, when flavors like strawberry and vanilla Peeps appeared, paving the way for bunnies and chicks to self-identify as root beer, blue raspberry, cotton candy, fruit punch, etc.
This season’s two new offerings, Hot Tamales Peeps (little red candy version) and Fruit Loops-flavored pops, featuring four Peeps impaled on a single stick, represent supermarket synergy at its finest. Elsewhere in the store, Peeps can now be found in other companies’ cookies, cereal and coffee creamer, all of which suggests that some of America’s favorite processed foods are mating in the aisles after closing time at Stop ‘N Shop.
The best thing I can say about the new generation of Peeps is that they no longer taste like just regular old marshmallows. From the Hot Tamales we get hints of cinnamon if not heat, from Chocolate Pudding Peeps we get instant Jell-O if not chocolate.
As I sat surrounded by dozens of Peeps in various stages of dismemberment, though, I felt little excitement, and not only because my apartment looked like a scene from one of those documentaries on chicken farm cruelty. For all the new shapes, colors and flavors, eating a Peep remains a more boring experience than blowing one up in a microwave. But that may say less about Peeps than my own warped ideas of entertainment after a year of quarantine.
That said, I applaud the company’s Egg Hunt mini chicks, the first individually wrapped Peeps, introduced just last year. It’s a relief to discover that at least some Peeps are capable of modeling good behavior, even as their boxed colleagues continue to congregate en masse, in defiance of health authorities.
Newsday writer and restaurant critic Scott Vogel aims for a refreshing, gimlet-eyed take on the Long Island food scene, often while drinking a refreshing gimlet.
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