"You can't help feeling corrupt and proud and decadent" Peeps Diorama contest becomes international event!

Continuing the alliterative examination of people's passion for Peeps, the Pioneer Press got 40 entries in the first year of its Peeps Diorama Contest four years ago. This year's contest received over 400 entries.

"Entries came from coast to coast, with submissions from New York City, San Francisco, Missouri and Arkansas. There was even an overseas entry from Paris."

In an article that accompanied the slide show of winning entries, the paper examines the phenomenon of what they called a Peeps fetish:

Hundreds of Web sites are devoted to using the iconic candy in ways as varied as works of art, gruesome pseudoscientific experiments and mythic dioramas.

A new book (...in which a celebrity family of Peeps goes on a vacation to Easter Island and gets trapped in a chocolate egg...) that's part pop-culture parody/part homage to Peeps came out this year.

Hilary Liftin, author of the memoir "Candy and Me (A Love Story)...said when eating something so artificial, processed and unwholesome looking, "you can't help feeling corrupt and proud and decadent."

"The craziest Peep-related candy I've ever gotten is a chocolate egg with a Peep inside it,"  [Steve Almond, author of "Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America] wrote in an e-mail. "Someone went to a lot of trouble to make that, which strikes me as both beautiful and pathetic." Peeps, however, are not one of Almond's joys. He calls them "a candy that encourages the notion that it is acceptable to eat child offspring."

Perhaps it's that rebellious unacceptability that attracts people. The Pioneer Press holds no illusions about those who enter, though:

"...we were impressed by the creativity and profound weirdness of those who use squishy Easter candy as an artistic medium."
"Contestants expressed pathetic thanks to the Pioneer Press for enabling their Peeps obsession..."
"Themes for the Peeps diorama are a sort of candy-coated lens of the cultural zeitgeist."
"And possibly the ultimate weirdness, dioramas showing Peeps as food"

Via Neatorama