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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Visiting the birthplace of Easter's innocent marshmallow icons -- and the Web sites that twist and transform them.
Apr 20, 2000 | I'm driving between Nazareth and Bethlehem, seeking enlightenment about an age-old Easter tradition. Quaint houses dot the landscape; one displays a flag honoring Marvin the Martian. As I take a sharp curve, a box of blue marshmallow rabbits slides closer to the driver's seat. I select one and bite its head off.
The rabbits have more to do with this pilgrimage than you might think. For this Nazareth and Bethlehem aren't in anyone's Holy Land; they're in Pennsylvania's rolling Lehigh Valley. And the Mecca I'm traveling to is decidedly secular. It's Bethlehem's Just Born factory, breeding ground for the most ubiquitous of all Easter candies: sugar-encrusted marshmallow Peeps and their cousins, marshmallow Bunnies.
For five years running, Peeps and Bunnies have been America's favorite nonchocolate Easter treats. But numbers don't tell half the story. These innocent-looking creatures -- the chick-shaped Peeps in particular -- have become icons of American pop culture. People don't just eat Peeps. They take pictures of them. They make crafts with them. They write songs about them. They put them on wreaths. They put them on pizza. They create parody porn Web sites for them. And some curious souls devote countless hours to Peep research, testing the effects of everything from heat to liquid nitrogen on the hardy little fertility symbols.
What is it about Peeps that inspires such passion? Is it their expressions, as winsome as a kitten offering you its paw? Maybe. But hollow chocolate rabbits are cute, too, and nobody writes loving odes to them. Is it their long-standing association with Easter? Perhaps; the Just Born company has been putting Peeps in Easter baskets since 1953. But Cadbury eggs have the holiday-icon thing going on too, and nobody builds little dioramas for them to live in.
Maybe it's the pure sugar rush that ensues five seconds after you pop a Peep in your mouth. Some folks find it blissful; others shudder in disgust at the mere thought. Arguably, though, those marshmallow Circus Peanuts provide the same result. And, safe to say, nobody devotes parody porn sites to them.
The Just Born factory seems the ideal place to start a Peeps-related investigation. It sits off a wide industrial street in Bethlehem, a sprawling town of 70,000 often pronounced "Bethl'm" by the locals. The company moved here in 1932, nine years after Russian immigrant Sam Born founded it in New York. Around 1953, Just Born acquired another candy manufacturer, Rodda. This was fortuitous. Rodda's products included an early version of Peeps: little marshmallow birds squeezed out of tubes and hand-decorated in a laborious process. Just Born began streamlining the process, and the Peeps phenomenon was on its way.
Today, Just Born's headquarters are shiny and modern, the result of a recent remodeling. Inside, I'm met by community relations manager Rose Craig, who says it's a "hoot" that Peeps have captured such a large -- and weird -- segment of the American imagination. She introduces John Kerr, group product manager for Peeps and other seasonal products. He's friendly and professional, with the air of someone who frequently deals with the Peep faithful. He offers a factory tour.
Before I can enter the factory, though, I have to remove all jewelry and other loose items that might conceivably fly off into a vat of burbling marshmallow. Even the cap on my felt-tip pen is forbidden. I'm given steel pens with the Just Born logo, along with a lab coat and hairnet. We head to an elevator; its handrail is filled with Mike & Ike jellybeans, another Just Born product. "It's a fun atmosphere," Kerr says with understatement.
Soon we step into the large, bright factory, and that's when the sensory overload kicks in. The air is humid and sharp with cinnamon, courtesy of the company's Hot Tamales candy product. Huge metal ovens -- in which jellybeans bake for 17 hours -- tower in front of us. All around, machines are producing such a clatter that most of the workers are wearing earplugs.
