I Drank the Peeps Milk

A few weeks ago, my friend Rod posted an article about Peeps Milk. Actually, several of my friends posted about it, but Rod posted the first one that I saw, so he gets the credit. I immediately went on a quest to find the Peeps Milk, because I was curious.

Several of my friends greeted this curiosity with horror.

Many people assumed the Peeps Milk would be horrible. Some compared the Peeps Milk to harbingers of the apocalypse, while others talked about the death of culture. I have bad news for you, friends: Peeps Milk is American culture. Taking a natural product generated by force from captive animals caged in an industrialized setting, pouring high fructose corn syrup generated by governmental agricultural subsidies into it, then flavoring it with chemicals before packaging it in bright colors and selling it at the average child's eye level in the grocery store? The only thing more American than that would be if every carton had a tiny American flag attached to the side.

I spent a few weeks trying to find the Peeps Milk. Some of the initial articles were slightly unclear about where to locate it, in that they suggested it was exclusive to Walmart. It turns out that only the orange flavor is exclusive to Walmart, but I went to four Walmarts nine times in less than ten days before I realized that. Have you ever been to that many Walmarts in that short a time span? Toward the end of last week I started to feel like Rooney Mara in the cemetery in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" remake, shuddering and whispering, "You have no idea what I've seen," and I decided to give up.

And that's all it took. Yesterday morning I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from the half marathon, and there it was:



Peeps Milk.

Peeps Milk as far as the eye could see.

I looked up to the heavens, hands out, eyes opened. I was like Miss Sofia in "The Color Purple" talking about that day at the store. I knew that there is a God, and that one day I would come home. I searched for the Peeps Milk, and right when I was about to give up, there it was.



Thank you, Jesus.

In the interests of convincing my friends that Peeps Milk is actually a symbol of American Culture, I decided to place it in a cultured setting, and busted out the Make Your Own Museum kit that's been sitting on my bookshelves since I got it in college for some reason.

I started with the Strawberry Crème Peeps Milk:



I was immediately shocked that it wasn't bright pink. I was expecting it to look like a liquefied Peep, but instead it just looks like a slightly tinted regular milk. I also expected it to taste like strawberries, or at least like strawberry milk usually tastes, and I was wrong there as well. It has a hint of strawberries. It has a hint of milk. It also has a hint of... something. After an entire glass, I couldn't figure out exactly what I was tasting, and decided to eat the Peep on the plate as a palate cleanser and then switch flavors.

I moved on to the Egg Nog Peeps Milk:



It looked like egg nog. It smelled like egg nog. The ingredient list suggested that it was some version of egg nog, but it has the consistency of whole milk. It's very thin egg nog, and doesn't have even the slightest hint of nutmeg, so it's not very good eggnog. I'm going to have to repurpose this, because I'm not going to drink any more of it. Egg nog French toast might be good, or maybe a bread pudding. I ate the egg-shaped Peep, again as a palate cleanser, and switched to the last flavor.

I couldn't find a Peep that looked like the one on the Chocolate Marshmallow Peeps Milk carton, so the milk stands alone:



After drinking it, I figured out what the weird underflavor in the Strawberry Crème milk was: marshmallow flavoring. This is chocolate milk with a strong dose of artificial marshmallow, and that's the same thing they did with the strawberry. This is what makes it Peeps-flavored instead of just regular flavored milk. It's not terrible. It's just a surprise.

So, the final verdict on the Peeps Milk is that the Strawberry and Chocolate flavors are drinkable, if you like flavored milk and the taste of marshmallows. Nobody should drink the Egg Nog flavor.

I have no verdict on the Orange Crème flavor, because I cannot bring myself to visit Walmart again to look for it at this time.

Even I have limits.