Yes my friends, the Twinkie was the highlight of my lunch today. When I say I enjoyed each and every bite, I really meant I enjoyed all two and a half bites. Twinkies are not exactly the largest pastry ever assembled. Heck, they are only 9.9 centimeters long.
A Twinkie is a huge part of every lunch it is a part of. Eating that dry sandwich to get to the Twinkie almost makes the sandwich bearable. Tell me you do not like a Twinkie better than a sandwich?
While I enjoyed my Twinkie, I started to think about what a Twinkie actually is. Twinkies were invented in Schiller Park, Illinois in about 1930 by James A. Dewar, a baker for Continental Bakeries (now Hostess). Someone actually had to think of the Twinkie because it certainly was not the Twinkie Kid. Dewar realized that several machines used to make cream-filled strawberry shortcake sat idle when strawberries were out of season, Dewar conceived a snack cake filled with banana cream, which he dubbed the Twinkie. A banana filled crème filled Twinkie sounds outstanding to me, but I digress. During World War II, bananas were rationed and Hostess was forced to switch to vanilla cream. This change proved so popular that Hostess never switched back to banana and still uses vanilla cream in Twinkies today. Even though I am still stuck on the banana crème filing, I guess the vanilla crème filing will just have to do for now.
Hostess makes approximately five hundred million Twinkies per year. If you are keeping score at home folks, that is thirty thousand five hundred and seventy eight miles of Twinkies made per year. That is a whole lot of vanilla crème to fill those delicious little cakes. Remember, one single Twinkie is only nine point nine centimeters long.
There are thirty nine ingredients that go into a Twinkie. Fourteen of those ingredients increase the shelf life of a Twinkie. Hostess will not say how long a Twinkie will last on the shelf before going bad, however I have learned it is a really really long time. Twinkies actually have a shelf life of twenty five days in all actuality. This is incredibly long for a baked good. The real reason that a Twinkie can last that long is the fact that there is absolutely no dairy products in the Twinkie itself. Makes you wonder what exactly those chemicals are, doesn’t it?
Another fun, well maybe only to me, fact is that America’s favorite processed food will actually explode in a microwave if cooked for over forty five seconds. I am sure that my cleaning lady will not be overly excited for me to try and prove Hostess wrong, however I did think about doing it today until I realized I did not want to waste one of those delicious nine point nine centimeter cakes from heaven.
Twinkies contain a whopping 160 calories per cake, along with 5 grams of fat, (including 2 grams of saturated fat), 20 milligrams of cholesterol, 2000 milligrams of salt, 25 grams of carbohydrates—but zero grams of fiber. Since most of the time you actually eat two or more Twinkies per sitting, Jenny Craig will be in business for a long long time. In other words, there's a reason many consider Twinkies to be the quintessential junk food and I believe Jenny Craig has plenty of stock options in Hostess.
Believe it or not, the fact that some folks go the extra step of deep-frying their Twinkies in funnel-cake batter, (not that I know what funnel cake batter is) an increasingly common confection at fairs and carnivals in the United States—is so unhealthy it staggers the imagination. I have tried one of these Twinkies at a fair and I was immediately hooked after the first bite.
Of course this column is called Well Thought Out Thoughts and a Bunch of Useless Information, so I had to get into what a Twinkie really is and why I like it so much. Hey, I never said that I do not think when I eat.
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