Change We Can Believe In?

Our old cereal bowls were blue and white and had occupied precious cabinet space in our tiny kitchen for more than a decade before my parents decided they had to go. They were chipped and battered and dingy, kind of. One boasted a long, fine crack right down the middle. Another had lost a great chunk to some dishwashing fiasco that we no longer discuss. Eyeing them over breakfast one early morning, my mother insisted they were past their prime. The most important meal of our days deserved worthier receptacles. I shrugged my shoulders and said a swift mental goodbye to the blue bowls, but my brother intervened.

“I don’t want new bowls,” he declared over and over again. As uniform ceramics never mattered very much to her, my mother relented. She disposed of the most damaged goods, saved two for his exclusive use, and bought a pretty set of floral china. My brother is now almost 27. He has lived in California for three years. But those two bowls are still in our cupboard, waiting to be recognized for their seniority. Each time he comes home to visit, he does just that. For as long as I’ve known him, Josh has maintained that “the original is always better.”

It turns out he isn’t the only one. The virtual universe erupted in protest earlier this week to resist the latest gross international indignity: Mondelez International revealed on Monday that it had changed the recipe and shrunk the portion sizes of Cadbury Creme Eggs in Britain. Fans of the beloved treat registered their objections all across the World Wide Web. They launched impassioned online petitions. They inaugurated support groups. The Guardian cried “Shellshock!” and journalist Ben Collins beseeched readers of the Daily Beast: “How Much More Indignity Can the Cadbury Creme Egg Take?”

I know we all count down to Apple announcements like Christmas and would exchange at least a portion of our dignity for Google Glass. I know fifteen minutes of fame sounds like an eternity in an age that has made 140 characters into cultural currency. But at least my own experience has demonstrated that many of us are in fact as terrified of change as some idiot brother of mine was of new cereal bowls. We are as nostalgic as our ancestors ever were for routine and consistency and familiarity. Even as we accept that change has wrought groundbreaking social movements and every constitutional amendment and at least a dozen new Cronut flavors, we refuse to overcome our inertia.

We want our Cadbury Creme Eggs to taste and look as they always have. And despite our revolutionary roots, the United States at least seems to appreciate as much. Hershey’s, which manufactures the confection stateside, announced that the “product sold in the U.S., that American consumers know and love, remains unchanged.” I am happy for us, guys. I really am.

But I wonder whether we have attached ourselves to more than supermarket chocolate. So, how do we feel about change? Do we embrace it better than our grandparents did? Do we pretend to? Should we all move back to the old country? What’s it like to be Amish, anyway? My father likes to say nothing is “what it used to be.” The produce at Fairway, the New York Times, Billy Crystal—they’ve all gone down hill. But is he right? Or is it as my grandmother, a mistress of reinvention, used to say: “Change is good”? In this relentless modern era, what is beyond improvement? And what are you ready to change?