Twinkie

An American giant in the snack game, Twinkies have come to be the stuff of legend. This golden, fluffy, sweet, cream-filled cake was invented nearly a century ago, in 1930, by James Dewar of the Continental Baking Company and has since evolved into a globally recognised icon. This particular Twinkie has been in the Materials Library for at least five years, unopened and retaining much of its original shape and colour, bringing to mind the well-known urban myth that Twinkies have an infinite shelf life due to the cacophony of chemicals used to make them.

In its early years, the snack was made with ingredients that any at-home baker would recognise: flour, eggs, butter, sugar, etc. However, this meant they had a shelf life of only two days, which would have been tricky for distribution and not very profitable. Revising the recipe many times over the years, manufacturer Hostess has increased the shelf life to a whopping 45 days. Despite what the company says, many people believe the Twinkie can last much longer. One school in the United States has been keeping an unwrapped Twinkie since 1976 as an observational experiment, and it has not appeared to decompose all that much.

During manufacturing, the cake batter is cooked in moulded pans that give the cakes a domed rectangular shape. Once cooled, three nozzles inject cream into the bottom and the filled cake is then packaged and sealed in a plastic wrapper. Twinkies were initially filled with banana cream; however, a shortage during World War II meant an alternative had to be found, making way for the vanilla flavour we know today. Hostess has since recreated the banana flavour and a vast range of special editions like chocolate, peppermint, cotton candy, and peanut butter, to name a few.

Twinkies are seen as a highly processed food with almost 40 ingredients used to make the finished product, one in five of which are corn-derived. Few of the ingredients in the Twinkie’s spongy exterior, artificial butter and synthetic vanilla flavourings are recognisable to consumers, and they are sourced from mining and manufacturing industries all over the world, from Chinese and Middle Eastern oil fields to steel mills and deep mines. Emulsifiers and hydrogenated vegetable oil help stabilise the batter, create a fluffy texture, and add flavour. The Twinkie is the perfect example of how evolving technologies, late-stage capitalism, and global demand for convenience and variety have led to a once humble cake recipe evolving into a feat of chemical engineering and a potent symbol of the global processed food economy in the 21st century.

The Twinkie's iconic fame has grown to stratospheric levels over the years. It was featured in cult movies Ghostbusters (1984), UHF (1989), and Zombieland (2009), and in 2012, Time magazine ranked it number one on its iconic junk foods list. Economists even coined the term ‘The Twinkie Era’ to refer to the period of prosperity in 1950s Post-War America, when the snack’s popularity grew as the sponsoring brand for the television program ‘The Howdy Doody Show’. Twinkies have even appeared in the courtroom, after defence lawyers of the infamous murderer of Harvey Milk and George Moscone claimed that his mental state had been altered by excessive consumption of highly processed junk food, coining the term the ‘Twinkie Defence’.