The snack cake that wouldn’t die

Does any other foodstuff—or brand, for that matter—exert as weird a pull on the dark side of the consumer psyche as the Twinkie? Despite (or more likely because of) its seeming perfection—the golden fluffiness, the creamy filling—people simply want to take this snack cake down. For years, it’s been dogged by the rumor (baseless) that it has an essentially indefinite shelf life. (In some versions of the myth, it actually has a half-life, like nuclear waste.) In the 1970s, it was widely (and falsely) reported that a murder suspect out West claimed his consumption of Twinkies had left him “with diminished capacity for reason.” And in the mid-1990s, at Rice University, a group of students performed disturbing tests on the product as part of a project called T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. (Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations). Even when the stories seem positive—like last week’s news that people are putting Twinkies into works of art—they often have overtones of humiliation. You’d think the Twinkie came from outer space, the way people act. Perhaps that explains the Web site Hostess has built for the product—with a theme of, yes, outer space. With Planet Twinkie, it seems Hostess knows that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

March 16, 2005 | Permalink