You could hear the collective American gasp world-wide on Wednesday.......Hostess Brands (formerly Interstate Bakeries Corporation) was admitting financial difficulties.....again.....and had filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection. Millions of North Americans turned their faces to the heavens and said, "Say it isn't so!" as they contemplated the possibility of a world without the sugar-filled, air-laden, calorie-packed, nutritive-zero-value "treats" (I use that word loosely.) such as Twinkies, Hostess Cupcakes, Sno Balls, Ding Dongs, and Ho Hos. Since Twinkies introduction into the world in 1930 as an inexpensive treat (figurative, not literal usage of the word) during the Great Depression, anyone between the ages of six and ninety has quite possibly eaten a product from Hostess Brands.
I have fond (yes, fond) memories of Hostess cupcakes packed into brown-bag school lunches or the white and chocolate Sno Balls plastered with coconut flakes. No matter that I would now describe the frosting on the cupcakes as cardboard, when I was a kid ripping through the cellophane wrapper, all I could think about was how good it was going to taste when I got to the goo in the center.
Never a big fan of Twinkies, this product was definitely sent to the "infamous" files when newspapers and televisions were filled with the 1979 San Francisco murder trial of Supervisor Dan White who shot and killed San Franciso city Supervisor Harvey Milk and then-Mayor George Mosconi. The fact that White committed the murders was never in question. What was in question was intent, and White's defense team came up with the improbable legal defense of Twinkies as the causal agent of a sugar rush that diminished White's mental capacity for reason. (This last sentence is not plagaristic. It is self-composed.)
The other product of Hostess Brands that, although I shall never forget, has long since been a no-show in my diet except at funeral lunches, is Wonder Bread. I still see loaves of this being unloaded in grocery store check-out lanes even though it barely qualifies as "food". In the seventies and eighties, one of my favorite recipes to make for lunches, brunches and special occasions such as baby and wedding showers was pinwheel sandwiches, which began with slices of Wonder Bread, then stuffed with either egg salad or bologna salad and rolled up into pinwheels. As a kid, I can remember climbing in the back of our giant station wagon filled with grocery bags, searching for the Wonder Bread that my mom bought. Once I found the bread, I'd open the bag, take a slice and form it into a ball in the palm of my hands. Its squishy contents were easily mashed together and made a tasty snack (or two or three) on the way home from the grocery store......which was only about a three-minute trip. It didn't take long to consume lots of slices of Wonder Bread.
Will Hostess Brands products go the way of contents in a time capsule to be opened in the year 3000? Will the only traces of Ding Dongs and Twinkies be left for future archaeologists to discover in ancient landfills in the next millennium?
Ancora probably
