In today’s America, unity is at a premium. With political vitriol, hate and a dissolvement of compromise, we need to find common ground wherever we can.

In this newsroom, we do a good job of finding moments of compromise, of sitting at the table, talking out our differences and finding a happy medium.

With our opinions on candy corn, however, that happy medium will never, ever be found.

Cameron and Melanie (The Children of the Corn):

Cameron: Anyone who doesn’t like candy corn is a coward who won’t give real, genuine cuisine a chance. Believe it or not, famed chef and person-who-yells Gordon Ramsay serves multiple candy corn dishes at his restaurants. Don’t look that up. It’s fake. The point is, as I’ve sat here typing these sentences, I’ve lost count of the amount of candy corn I’ve eaten. Each piece is blurring together and most of my bloodstream is sugar, but it was a conscious decision I made, and I’m glad I did it. I imagine this is what Hunter S. Thompson felt like all the time.

Melanie: Candy corn is iconic; you just can’t have Halloween without candy corn. It takes you back to the first time you picked up your bag of Halloween candy as a young child out trick-or-treating. It harkens back to a simpler time. And even as a college student, candy corn is the perfect balance of hard candy and soft candy, full of sugar and deliciousness. Candy corn is Halloween, and although I wouldn’t dream of eating it for any other holiday, but when the plastic skeletons come out every year, I get myself some candy corn. Taking candy corn away from Halloween is like smashing a jack-o-lantern on someone else’s front porch. You just don’t do that.

Laina and Valerie (The Middle-of-road Editors):

Laina: As a kid, my mom would put candy corn and peanuts in a jar. That’s how the Yost household ate it, and that’s the only way candy corn will taste good. Valerie tried this out, and she agrees — with peanuts in the mix, candy corn tastes better, more like a candy bar.

Valerie: Laina and I agree on its own, candy corn is eh. We imagine biting into a piece of candy corn and biting into a candle would be the same. We won’t go out of our way to buy candy corn. There are much better Halloween candies. If candy corn went extinct, we would be A-OK with that. If it continued to exist, we would be A-OK with that, too. Ultimately, Laina and Valerie are neutral on the topic, as journalists should be.

Addie and Brandon (The Passionate Haters):

Addie: I try candy corn every year and, every year, it sucks. I don’t know why I expect it to suddenly get better, but my opinion hasn’t changed since I was a kid. I would go through my Halloween candy and throw it all straight into the garbage. The texture feels like soft wax and it’s too sweet for any normal human to eat. It’s like taking a bite of a candle that is just absolutely coated in sugar. People who like it are lying to themselves and would probably enjoy eating a bowl of wax and sugar.

Brandon: My grandmother would always have a bowl of candy corn out for whenever I visited in the fall. I vividly remember crying one year because I couldn’t stand the sight of the wicked candy.

No matter the effort we put in, we will never find a compromise. We yelled. We screamed. We threw peanuts at each other.

But we only came to one consensus: At least we’re not eating Peeps.