Egging on the competition over Easter candies

I tell my students that the higher they climb in academia, the less appropriate binary arguments become.

After all, the world is more complex than right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, yes vs. no. The truth, to the extent it can be determined at all, is more than one of two sides. It’s often somewhere in between.

So I hope they’ll understand my sole exception, the area where it comes down to choosing the truth or the lie. And it happens at Easter.

I’m talking about the Cadbury Creme Egg or the Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg.

You like one or the other. There is no middle ground.

Picture a lone microphone descending from the roof of an arena toward the lighted ring below. The boxing announcer intones:

“In this corner, weighing in at 1.2 ounces, is the Cadbury Creme Egg. It’s 150 calories of milk, eggs and soy, wrapped in colorful tinfoil, that has never seen the actual inside of a hen.

“And, in this corner, also weighing 1.2 ounces, is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg, 170 calories and a blend of peanuts, chocolate and milk, also a stranger to any oviparous creature.

“Come out and touch gloves, boys, and let’s have a clean fight.”

At the risk of belaboring the boxing imagery a little longer, let me say that, for this chocophile, Reese’s is the winner by TKO every day and twice on (Easter) Sunday.

And I’m all about the egg. Forget Reese’s hearts for Valentine’s Day, pumpkin shapes for Halloween and Christmas trees in December.

Those seasonal delights, while still yummy, are walking on chocolate-covered eggshells compared to the Easter iteration, with its perfect ratio of chocolate to peanut butter.

Heck, Reese’s eggs are even better than the regular Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which are too greasy for my taste.

I know, I know, Cadbury Creme Eggs have the better pedigree. They hail originally from England, which makes them more proper and stiff-upper-lipped.

A fact sheet straight outta Cadbury World, the chocolatier’s tourist trap, er, “family attraction” in Birmingham (home of, I kid you not, the 4D Chocolate Adventure), notes that John Cadbury was monkeying around with so-called “French eating chocolate” as early as 1842. The first Cadbury Easter Eggs arrived some 33 years later. The modern Cadbury Creme Egg, with the distinctive yellow center, however, is a spring chicken by comparison, arriving only in 1971.

Meanwhile, Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs get an F for marketing, with little officially sanctioned information available online. The best I could find is an unauthorized history on collectingcandy.com, which says the candy made the national scene in 1967 after being tested only in Pennsylvania the year before.

Originally, they cost only 10 cents each, at a time when a dozen real eggs cost just 49 cents. This year, my Reese’s obsession has cost me almost nine times as much.

Here’s a little secret, though: I’d pay almost any price for them. It’s like “The Devil and Daniel Webster” written in chocolate.

My wife and I have a friendly back-and-forth about Cadbury and Reese’s every year, in the same way some couples banter about Browns or Steelers, Democrat or Republican.

She’s a Cadbury aficionado, something I didn’t know before we married. That’s a question that belongs in every couple’s premarital counseling. Forget finances, desire for children and division of household duties, what you really need to soul-search is if you can pledge to honor and cherish somebody who prefers the putrid insides of a Cadbury Creme Egg over the sublime perfection of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg.

I’m not saying it’s a dealbreaker, but it’s definitely a point to ponder, right up there with finding out your future partner prefers box wines to bottles, or Chick-fil-A to Raising Cane’s.

Interestingly (which is what people always say right before telling you something not in the least bit interesting), both products are made by Hershey’s in the United States (with U.S. manufacturing of Cadbury eggs outsourced to Canada). So whichever side you choose, Hershey’s wins.

There’s an egg-cellent Easter argument about capitalism in there somewhere, kids, and that’s no yolk.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.