Twilight of the Twinkie

I saw this documentary about how civilizations decline, and it said one sign that an empire is about to fall is an increase in decadent food, and a rise of celebrity chefs. Seriously: in Roman Empire days, just before the gates were sacked by barbarians, people were grooving on gluttony, celebrity chefs and cooking demos. Just like today!

I thought of this when I heard about Deep-Fried Twinkies. It’s one of those over-the-top concoctions that became popular in US state fairs and sporting events a few years back. This involves freezing the Twinkie, dipping it in batter, and deep-frying it to ensure certain, instant death.

I’ve never had a Deep-Fried Twinkie, but I was somehow touched by the ingenuity of this: at last, the golden, cream-injected sponge cake snack has become a decadent delicacy of modern cuisine!

Except the Deep-Fried Twinkie — and Twinkies in general — might not be around much longer.

Yes, in some alarming news for the nostalgic snack food sector, Hostess, the maker of Twinkies and other nutritious lunchbox fillers for Americans growing up in decades past, has announced it’s closing shop.

Yes, the company that has survived so long thanks mostly to pop cultural references to its products — Ding Dongs, Ring Dings, Ho Ho’s and the like — filed for Chapter 11 protection under US bankruptcy law, yet another victim of American belt tightening.

No, I don’t mean people are eating fewer snack foods and thus becoming thinner. Rather, companies are tightening their budgets. Apparently Hostess had found it difficult to maintain its 18,000-plus workforce (based in Missouri) and pay pensions to its many employees, who have probably been stuffing Twinkies with creamy white substances on assembly lines for countless decades and were probably contemplating a golden parachute retirement of some kind. Unfortunately, Hostess, which also owns Wonder Bread, Dolly Madison and Drake’s cakes, is taking that parachute with them, wrapped up in Chapter 11 protection. So what about those sacked employees? As Hostess execs might say: Let them eat cakes.

So what exactly is a Twinkie, Filipinos are possibly wondering? It’s a small, individually wrapped sponge cake filled with a white sugary substance. Most people joke that Twinkies are like Spam: pumped with so many preservatives that they will last forever, even withstanding nuclear holocaust. (Actually not true: they’ll last about a month before spoiling.) It’s no wonder Woody Harrelson is so fixated on finding some in the post-apocalyptic Zombieland: they’re kind of yummy, and made most kids’ school lunches a lot brighter. But while Spam has managed to cross the great cultural divide from joke to cherished breakfast item among Filipinos, the Twinkie never really made the cut here: you won’t find Hostess cakes on local snack shelves.

Hostess had other hits, of course. Ring Dings were hockey puck-shaped chocolate cakes with chocolate fudge filling; Devil Dogs were chocolate cakes shaped like hotdog buns and stuffed with the same white creamy substance as Twinkies; then there were the amusingly named Sno Balls, which were chocolate dome cakes covered in coconut shavings; and of course Ho Ho’s, which nobody actually remembers eating.

Twinkies were the big pop cultural enchilada, though. There are countless references in movies and TV. Here are a few:

• In Ghostbusters, Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) holds up a Twinkie while trying to explain that the psychokinetic energy building up in Manhattan will result in a 35-foot-long snack weighing about 600 pounds marching down the city streets. Instead, they face a giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow man.

• In Die Hard, Sergeant Al Powell stops at a convenience store and loads his arms up with the Hostess treats, just before getting an emergency call from John MacLaine in the tower. “They’re for my wife,” he peevishly tells the convenience store kid.

• In The Deer Hunter, Axel, one of the steel workers, snacks on a Twinkie dipped in mustard.

• In Disturbia, a bored Shia LaBeouf uses Elmer’s Glue to create a Tower of Twinkies. 

• In The Iron Giant, nine-year-old Hogarth squirts “extra” cream inside his Twinkie.

• Family Guy loves to reference Twinkies, like the episode where the family builds a town around a Twinkie factory after Y2K causes a nuclear apocalypse.

• Disney’s WALL-E features a Twinkie-like snack food populated by (ew!) ipis.

• And, of course, Woody Harrelson’s character in Zombieland is unnaturally obsessed with the snack cake: “Someday, very soon, life’s little Twinkie gauge is gonna go empty!” Woody didn’t realize how prophetic those words would prove.

Interestingly, Hostess also made another staple of white American households that is now in danger of disappearing forever: Wonder Bread, a bread so staunchly white it could have been shown at an early Yoko Ono exhibit. Wonder Bread references mostly turned up in pop culture as derogatory one-liners in Spike Lee films and rap songs.

Not surprisingly, the news that Hostess had stopped production of Twinkies led to a bit of a panic run in the US last week. People actually started stockpiling Twinkies, and are selling boxes of them on eBay as we speak. They’re selling them for a handsome profit too, charging up to $1,000 for a $5 box of Twinkies, according to the International Herald Tribune. It’s a commodities market that Wall Street never saw coming.

This is actually happening. It may not be the snack food equivalent of the canary dropping dead in the toxic coalmine, but if you can sell a Twinkie at a 10,000-percent profit online, surely this means the end of something. Or possibly the beginning of something. Who knows? Maybe that spongy golden cake will become… the new gold standard.

In any case, with all those preservatives, even if the US economy does collapse and civilization hurtles back into the Dark Ages, the Twinkie hoarders will have lots to snack on.