Requiem for a Snack Cake

I was in the supermarket the other day and going by the snack cake section I saw that the Hostess products were almost all gone--only the mini-muffins remained. No Twinkies, Ring Dings, Yodels, or Hostess Cupcakes. It was big news just a week or two that the company had finally gone under, and although surely some other food conglomerate will buy the rights to the names and recipes for these durable sweets, it stirred a nostalgic pang in some people.

It also raised the ire of people on the left, especially the increasingly loud voices that are fighting back for unionized workers, or those who want to unionize. If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, than Hostess is a roaring asshole. Blaming the baker's union for their financial problems, they also gave gaudy bonuses to their executives, even though they had gone through Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice.

Hostess has a firm foothold in American culture. The company was founded in 1930, and I doubt there's an American who hasn't consumed at least one of its products. As kids in the '60s we were fed Wonder Bread on an almost daily basis, even though it's probably one of the most unhealthy products there is (despite claims that it made children grow). But the snack cakes, especially Twinkies, are what the company is known for. Twinkies, the golden spongecake filled with cream, is purportedly able to last years without spoilage (it received a tip of the cap to that notion in the film Wall-E), and was used as a defense for the killer of Harvey Milk.

I was more of a Ring Ding man, or should I say Ding Dong (the two were competitors, until Hostess merged with Drake--both look like hockey pucks with a cream filling). I also liked Yodels and Suzy Qs. I haven't had any of those for years--the last time I bought a box of Ring Dings (or was it Yodels?) I consumed the entire package in one sitting. While working at a job a few years ago I was drawn to the insidious vending machine, which dispensed Hostess Cupcakes, both the chocolate and orange varieties. As Homer Simpson would say, "Droooooool."

Of course these products have zero nutritional value, but fuck they are good. It's kind of amazing that the human craving for fat and sugar, which was necessary when we were hunter-gatherers, still haunts us today (or at least me). As the nation faces an obesity crisis the momentary disappearance of these products is a good thing, but they will be back. We are hungry.