Every Day Is Special: April 6 - Hostess Twinkie Day

April 6 - Hostess Twinkie Day

Posted on April 6, 2019

Try to imagine the best, most decadent cake ever. What would it look like? What would it taste like?

I personally like the Berry Chantilly Cake from Whole Foods...

...and I make a great Chocolate Cherry Cake using a bundt pan.

And there are a billion gorgeous cake decorating ideas out there now - although I'm not sure a super fun or beautiful cake is necessarily the most super tasty one!

But you want to know what is NOT the most decadent cake? NOT the most delicious, nor the most beautiful?

This:

The famous Hostess Twinkie - which was invented by James Alexander Dewar on this date in 1930 - is called a "snack cake" because it's super easy to package, ship and stack - and even super easy to eat. You can forget about needing plates and forks - just use your hands to hold the "golden sponge cake" outside; there is no frosting or icing or decorations on the outside, but instead cream filling in the middle.

The first Twinkies were made with banana-cream filling. But during World War II, bananas were rationed, so Dewar's company switched to vanilla cream. That proved to be much more popular, so most Twinkies, most of the product's lifetime, have been made with sponge cake and vanilla cream filling.

Hostess filed for bankruptcy in 2012, and for several months Twinkies were no longer available. However, another company bought the Hostess brand and reintroduced Twinkies. Even though there is more push in the U.S. to make and buy and eat healthier foods, and Twinkies are generally considered junk food - maybe even the perfect symbol for junk food in general! - Hostess still cranks out around 500 million Twinkies per year, and I read that in 2005, people in the U.S. spent $47 million on Twinkies!

Twinkies have become something of a pop culture reference. Mostly in a bad way. Mostly in a they're-not-natural or they're-total-junk-food way. Here are a few pop-culture Twinkies:

Twinkies last forever?

There's an urban legend that Twinkies are so unnatural that they have an infinite shelf life. In one post-apocalyptic movie, someone eats a Twinkie that is 1,000 years old, and in the movie WALL-E, a cockroach eats Twinkies that are at least 700 years old. In real life, people talk about Twinkies being full of chemicals and having 37 ingredients, as if those facts result in a shelf life of more than a century...

I think this photo of the 37 ingredients found in Hostess Twinkies
makes those ingredients look scary. Like, there is enriched bleached
wheat flour, water, sugar, and eggs in the ingredients - and there
is definitely a way of picturing those items in a more familiar, less
science-experiment-y kind of way!!!

...BUT actually Twinkies do have an expiration date, and company peeps say that the snack cakes are only on the shelf 7 to 10 days. In a pinch, thanks to some preservatives, Twinkies can be enjoyed for 25 days - maybe even up to 45 days - after manufacture...but not months, years, decades, or centuries!!

Also, I want to point out that EVERYTHING is made of "chemicals" - you, me, water, rocks, and every single kind of food, including Twinkies. And chemicals with "scary names" like dihydrogen monoxide are not necessarily more dangerous than chemicals with non-scary names like water. (You may already know that dihydrogen monoxide IS water!)

Twinkiegate?

In the 1980s, Minnesota passed what some call the Twinkies Law (aka the Minnesota Campaign Act), which says that candidates may not pass out meat, drink, or other food to lure voters to their campaign events. The reason for the nickname is that a man running for Minneapolis City Council spent about $31 on sugary sweets such as Twinkies to pass out to senior citizens at a campaign event - and he got indicted for it! (He ended up just getting a verbal warning from the judge, but he lost the election.)

Twinkie defense?

A horrible double-assassination in California - and the killer caught red-handed - resulted in a slam-dunk court case. One of the witnesses for the defense mentioned that the defendant had eaten a lot of junk food (and I guess Twinkies were mentioned in passing, along with HoHos and Ding Dongs) during a bout with depression, and that witness testified that the mental depression helped lead to the double homicide. The defendant was found guilty, but of manslaughter rather than of premeditated murder, and he got much lighter sentence than expected. Ever since then, the argument of junk food leading to diminished sanity has been criticized and sneeringly called "the Twinkie defense."

Twinkie in a time capsule?

President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton invited students and presidential and congressional medal winners to chose a variety of objects to put into a time capsule during the Millennial ceremonies on December 31, 1999, and January 1, 2000. One of the items suggested was a Hostess Twinkie, which was referred to as "an object of enduring American symbolism" (according to one source) or "an enduring American icon" (according to another source). But apparently Twinkies weren't actually put into the time capsule - for fear of mice.

The time capsule will be opened in 2100.

A Twinkie diet?

One university professor tried to demonstrate that eating convenience store junk foods can still result in weight loss, as long as calories in are exceeded by calories out. This was called the Twinkie diet even though it also included Oreos, Doritos, protein shakes, multivitamins, milk, cereal, and even fresh vegetables!

In related news, there was a man who lived well into his nineties who has been called the Twinkie King because he ate at least one Twinkie every day for more than 64 years! (That's more than 23,000 Twinkies!!!) That doesn't mean that eating Twinkies is healthy, of course - but it's interesting to note that this snack-cake fan did eventually get noticed by Hostess, who gave him a lifetime supply of free Twinkies at some point.