Are Twinkies Gone Forever?
Try not to panic. I don't think Twinkies are going anywhere soon.Yes, Hostess is shutting down. But before you rush out to try and get your last Twinkie ever, consider this. I don't believe Twinkies will ever die.
My guess is that Twinkies will be aquired by some other snack food business before we see them fade away.
Brands don't die, even when perhaps they should.
Despite the many urban legends about the indestructability of Twinkies, Did you know they are made with the same chemical used in embalming? Or that they last 50 years? And the many sadly true stories about the ingredients used to create them today, these treats once upon a time were the real deal.
They started out back in 1930.
James A. Dewar, who worked at Hostess predecessor Continental Baking Company in Schiller, Ill., wanted to find a way to use the bakery's shortbread pans year round. Then, the shortbread was filled with strawberries, but strawberries were only available for a few weeks a year.So he used the oblong pans to bake spongecakes, which he then filled with banana cream. Bananas were a more regular crop.
Yes! Twinkies once contained real fruit. Twinkies were created because of seasonality.
All went well until World War II hit and rationing meant a limited supply of fruits like bananas. And then came the vanilla cream Twinkie, which was more popular anyway.
It was around this time that American food culture did an about face. It was an era when the industrialization and processing of cheap food wasn't just desired, it was glorified. Cans and chemicals could set you free. And they certainly set Twinkies free of the nuisance of a short shelf life. It's not formaldehyde that keeps these snack cakes feeling fresh, it's the lack of any dairy products in the so-called "cream."
When Twinkies signed on as a sponsor of the "Howdy Doody" show during the 1950s, their cultural legacy was sealed. Taglines such as "The snacks with a snack in the middle" began etching themselves into generations of young minds.
It was the snack cake heyday. Twinkies were being deep-fried at state fairs, doing cameos in movies like "Ghost Busters" and "Die Hard" and being pushed by Spider-Man in comic books.
Not all the attention was positive. Somewhere along the line, Twinkies became the butt of jokes, mostly about their perceived longevity (though Hostess staunchly maintains 25 days is the max).
Then something happened. Americans who for decades had not been listening to how food was produced suddenly started paying attention, seeking out organic goat cheeses made from the milk of an unoppressed herd raised on a fence-free collective within a 20-mile radius of home.
Suddenly products that had so prospered by their artificiality lost their allure. Even Hostess, which blamed this week's shutdown mostly on a labor dispute that hobbled its facilities, has acknowledged that consumer concern about health and food quality changed the game. People just weren't buying snack cakes like they used to.
It's hard not to wonder how the American diet, the American palate, would be different if the parents of the `50s hadn't begun a cycle of turning to processed packages as the de facto snack of childhood.
And does nostalgia alone justify the continuation of something so patently bad for us?
Of course nostalgia, taste awfully good.
Are Twinkies Gone Forever?
Really, I doubt it. Somewhere, someone will keep the Great snackfood alive.Don't forget to bookmark this Blog!
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