Cake is overrated. Yet for some reason, it’s used to celebrate the biggest events of our lives, including birthdays, weddings and retirements.

I believe that people like pie better, they just don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings when someone bakes them a cake.

Seriously, can you honestly tell me that you wouldn’t rather have a bite of warm pecan pie with your glass of milk than a piece of cake?

Even royalty prefers pie. Marie Antoinette didn’t say, “Let them eat pie.” She was keeping the pie for herself.

Fortunately, I grew up in a pie family. My mom’s chocolate pie is famous in Southwest Arkansas and is often requested for family gatherings and church events. She also makes a chocolate peanut butter pecan pie that puts Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups to shame.

For birthdays, my sister and I always had a cake with candles, but we also requested and received a pie. If you look back at the photos from these birthday parties, there’s the cake, but you don’t see any pie. We’d already eaten it.

Even the phrases that we use in language reflect the importance of pie. Big ideas are ‘pie in the sky’. An enjoyable task is ‘as easy as pie’. People who inherit something want ‘their piece of the pie’. And something that originated in the good old USA is ‘American as apple pie’.

Can you imagine Chuck Norris ever telling anyone to ‘Shut their cake hole’?

And a pie needs nothing added to it to make it edible. Kids always eat the icing off the cake first and, many times, leave the cake. So do lots of adults.

So, let this be my pie manifesto. We must change the way things have always been. It is time for pie to take its rightful place on our plates and in our lives.

There will be those who read this and completely disagree with every word here.

That’s fine. Let them eat cake.

©2014 John Moore