Twinkies

The Interstate Baking Company recently filed for bankruptcy. In other words, Twinkies have tanked.

Who would have ever thought Americans could forsake their Twinkie habit? A lunchbox staple for generations, Twinkies have fallen from grace. What happened?

The answer appears to be that the world has finally caught up with my mother. Years before the term “health” food was invented, my mother was packing nutritious lunches for me every day. The format never varied: a cheese or peanut butter sandwich on 100% whole wheat bread, an apple and homemade cookies.

In my entire life I’ve probably eaten a grand total of three Twinkies. When you grow up with real food (called “slow” food now) you are hooked for life.

But now moms who grew up on Twinkies are doing a radical thing. They are reading food labels. Significant numbers of them are deciding not to feed their kids a chemical lunch.

I worked for a natural foods bakery for five years and remember an experiment done by one of the office people. An unopened package of Twinkies was placed on top of a file cabinet for two years. The Twinkies didn’t mold, rot, shrink, smell, dry out or decompose. We could only conclude that Twinkies are shot full of embalming fluid.

A few centuries from now some archeologist will probably dig up an intact package of Twinkies and ponder the culture that produced “food” with archival qualities.

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2 thoughts on “Twinkies”

  1. I had forgotten about Twinkies until I saw the movie ‘Milk’ and was reminded that his assasnin used the ‘Twinkie Defense’ during his trial. Scary stuff.

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  2. That is one scary twinkie story. The twinkies will be in the land fill with the unrolled hot dogs. They will feed the nuclear rats. Yuck. My mom packed the same sort of lunches you had…in junior high and high school. In grade school, staying at school for lunch was a sort of disgrace. We had to walk home and back for lunch, even if we lived over a mile. I lived two blocks away. Back in the day,as my daughter would say. In the last century.

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