Hostess Brands filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, and everything about the story was depressing. First, and most obvious, was the symbolic blow to the solar plexus of American iconography: the inventor of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, teetering on the verge of extinction. A spate of nostalgia pieces appeared, pondering our lost innocence and bemoaning the Death of the Twinkie. (One writer even went further, pining for the fluorescent orange cupcakes of his lost youth.)
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I have a lot of sympathy for this point of view. In fact, my first instinct was to dilate fondly on the snack-cake arcadia of my own increasingly remote youth, such as the bizarre comic-book advertorials that so depressed me as a boy. I love Wonder Bread, but I was never particularly interested in Twinkies. It was beyond me, then and now, why anyone would eat a snack cake that didn’t have frosting. But like everybody else, I think of the unnatural treats with a strange sentimentality. It’s strange because of the dark side of the Twinkie: how it has become, for two generations of Americans, the image of everything false and artificial in modern society. How it lasts forever, even after the atomic holocaust or zombie apocalypse; how it supposedly deranged Dan White, the crazed assassin of Harvey Milk and George Moscone; how gay men call hairless youths “twinks”; how the product name has been used by Asian-Americans to deride over-assimilated kids for being “yellow on the outside and white on the inside”; how Paula Deen loved them and how she was just a few days ago hectored by health-food types for having now gotten her comeuppance (“Paula Deen, Fried Twinkies Queen, Has Diabetes”). Twinkies are the manna of the food desert; they transcend their status as semi-perishable snack treats.
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That’s when I realized why Twinkies and other “legacy brands” are so powerful. It doesn’t matter if they are any good or who owns the companies that make them. (In the case of Twinkies, the 82-year-old brand has been through more hands than the Maltese Falcon.) No one cares. All that matters are “Twinkies” and their flavor memories, their childhood associations, their inextricable place in American culture. That asset is non-renewable, irreplaceable, and owes almost nothing to its owners — or to its availability in stores. It is a product of our lives, our emotions and our hopelessly unhealthy eating habits. Hostess may soon be dead, but long live Twinkies! They are eternal in more ways than one.