Because someone mentioned it in comments on my Facebook link to a recent blog post, I am now compelled to discuss the pros and cons of Twinkies, that sweet treat adored by stoners and other kids everywhere.
The Twinkies Legend ramped up a few years ago when the fried Twinkie was introduced to thronging sophisticates of fair fare. People drove for hours just to taste it, and the initial purveyors of this particular fine food sold 26,000 fried Twinkies in just 18 days. The magic was not obvious to those watching from the sidelines, but no one can deny the faithful. We, personally, have never tried this delicacy. According to reports, the famous creamy filling melts and soaks into the cake, giving it a souffle or pudding-like texture. It was an instant hit.
Deep-frying isn’t the only way to get Twinkies into your family’s diet. There’s an entire cookbook, 112 pages long, containing more than 50 recipes with Twinkies as an ingredient.
Never get between Americans and their Twinkies. In 1987, teamsters who delivered Twinkies to New York City and its New Jersey suburbs went on strike. Area Twinkies lovers panicked. The reaction was “not unlike smokers who start to tense up when they run out of cigarettes and all the stores are closed.” Twinkies addicts called distant friends and relatives to send in emergency supplies. We imagine the airlifts resembled Berlin in 1949.
Disaster struck again in March of 2000, when the teamsters’ strike closed bakeries all over the Northeast. The Internet came to the rescue during this “Great Twinkie Famine of 2000.” eBay made out like a bandit, selling 20 batches of Twinkies for over $5,000.
Twinkies are popular, no doubt about it. According to Hostess Foods, 500,000,000 Twinkies are produced annually. In case you got cross-eyed counting zeroes, that’s half a billion, with a B. America’s population today is a little over 3.14 hundred million; America is pi, and Twinkie is the ubiquitous cake that radiates among us.
You might think that with popularity like this, the company that concocts Twinkies would be sitting on a big pile of money. Not so. Just this January, Hostess Brands filed for bankruptcy protection – the second time it has done so in the last ten years. Yesterday we learned that negotiations with its unionized employees might result in the employees owning a piece of the action. Twinkies lovers everywhere hope that out of these bankruptcy negotiations will come the ingredients for Twinkies’ success.
Like so many of our favorite mass-produced foods, the ingredients of Twinkies cannot be identified by the common consumer. In fact, they are so mysterious that a guy named Steve Ettlinger wrote an entire book about these ingredients. It turns out that Twinkies come from mines. That’s right. Twinkies ingredients are mined (limestone, gypsum), drilled (petroleum), refined, and synthesized into those tongue-twisting polysyllabic compounds that are printed on the package.
Upon learning about these ingredients, we were bemused to realize that it is necessary to chill Twinkies before frying because plastic melts at high temperatures. And that creamy filling? There’s no cream in it. It’s sugar and shortening. Maybe even made from beef – so vegan Twinkies lovers, beware. When confronted with the truth about the sources of ingredients, David Leavitt, Vice President Snack Marketing at Hostess said, Deconstructing the Twinkie is like trying to deconstruct the universe. We think the millions of people … would agree that Twinkies just taste great.”
That’s right. He said it. Food doesn’t actually have to be made of food to taste good.
Science has weighed in on the Twinkies question. The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project at Rice University subjected Twinkies to a series of strenuous tests to determine their properties. T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. is an acronym for Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations. Dedicated researchers jolted Twinkies with electricity, dropped Twinkies from staggering heights to replicate Galileo’s experiment, exposed Twinkies to radiation, plumbed the depths of Twinkies intelligence, subjected Twinkies to rapid oxidation, tested the density of Twinkies, and more.
At this point, we are hard-pressed to find anything positive about Twinkies except their taste. We thought that perhaps the nutritional value would be positive, since we heard rumors a couple of years ago that someone once went on a Twinkie Diet and actually lost weight. It turns out that what the guy essentially did was starve, so don’t replace your amphetamines with Hostess products just yet. If you want a hypoglycemic rush, Twinkies are your tool.
So what about the rumors of the eternal shelf-life of Twinkies? Turns out this is in error, too. We can attest to the lie. When we helped our teenage son empty the trunk of his car once, we found a box of Twinkies that had been bouncing around back there for quite some time. “In case I need a snack,” he explained. Sure. Boys get hungry. We understand. So we removed one of those delicious golden snack cakes from the box. It felt funny. It was hard. Like, brick-hard.
“How long have these been back here?” we asked.
Our progeny shrugged. “A few months, maybe.”
We were glad he hadn’t been on a crime spree. Had he needed to use the Twinkie Defense, he’d’ve broken a tooth.
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