Thursday, November 29, 2012

Industrial Twinkies, Ding Dongs Won't Be Gone Long, But Why Care?

Twinkies won't be gone long from U.S. grocery shelves. Neither will Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, Suzy O's, Honey Buns, chocolate Cup Cakes with white squiggles, "fruit" and pudding pies, donettes, or my childhood favorite, Sno Balls (chocolate cakes filled with vanilla cream, covered with marshmallow, sprinkled with "coconut").

Purity-white, near-texture-free Wonder Bread won't be  missing long from American homes, either. 


After two bankruptcies in nine years, Hostess has closed its doors. And shut off the spigot of its industrial bakery snacks, even though nearly 36 million packages of Twinkies were sold in 2011


I guarantee that some clever entrepreneur will swiftly snap-up rights to the brand names, trademarks, and formulas for these industrial food products.  
The gooey, chemical-oozing goodies will be remarketed as nostalgia products, and marked up to radically higher retail prices... as is wont for all baby-boomer memorabilia. 

No, consumers won 't have to hanker long for their next Twinkie fix. Mark my words. 


Until then, why not try a better version of Hostess industrial snacks? Bakery goods created with real food ingredients such as:

  • fresh milk and cream, 
  • real eggs and butter, 
  • organic flours, and 
  • natural ingredients such as vanilla bean, fresh fruits, and fine chocolates.
Lusher delicacies made without preservatives, chemicals, additives, fillers, and artificial flavors and colors. 

Local bakeries around the country are delighting in offering better versions of Hostess products, including Cake Monkey Bakery here in Los Angeles, which offers online ordering for its (unbelievably!) scrumptious concoctions. (Click HERE for Cake Monkey ordering info.)


And recipes abound to bake or customize your own Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos and other snacks. 

After all, consider the industrial alternative. Hostess-manufactured Twinkies contain 37 ingredients, including: 

"High Fructose Corn Cyrup, Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable and/or Animal Shortening, Soy Protein Isolate, Calcium and Sodium Caseinate, Salt, Mono and Diglycerides, Polysorbate 60, Soy Lecithin, Soy Flour, Cornstarch, Cellulose Gum, and Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate." 
The Twinkies ingredients list gets grotesquely worse with closer scrutiny. If you can stomach the grisly industrial food truth, I suggest you read Looking Inside the Twinkie at the New York Times. 

So no, Twinkies won't be gone long from U.S. grocery shelves. Neither will Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, Suzy O's, Honey Buns, chocolate Cup Cakes with white squiggles, "fruit" and pudding pies, donettes, or Sno Balls. 


But why in the world would you miss them?


1 comment:

  1. These Twinkies and Ho-Hos were part of the fabric of my 70s childhood landscape, although I rarely ate them. Even as a child, I questioned the foamy alien texture of a Twinkie, the not quite chocolate flavour of a Hostess Cupcake. It may generate nostaligia for older people, but the company was out of step with the times. Calling it a bakery when every product was produced more from chemistry than a recipe was misleading, to say the least. We should be celebrating that this industrial 'food' manufacturer is becoming a thing of the past, and relieved that future generations won't be tempted to eat foods with shelf lives that can be measured using carbon dating.

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