Twinkie, Oh Twinkie…wherefore art thou Twinkie? Tucked away in just about every single corner of American culture, that’s where. From mom-and-pop convenience shops located in far-off rural neighborhoods to Mainstreet mega-superstores, the cream-filled golden sponge cake treat that simply can’t be beat has been fulfilling our collective snack food cravings for 77 years. James A. Dewar was the mastermind behind Continental Baking Company’s original 5 cent package of Twinkies, its distinctive name inspired by a billboard ad for Twinkle Toe shoes. Originally launched as a banana cream filled confection, World War II rations for the highly favored tropical fruit forced the company to adapt by offering their baked treats with a vanilla cream center…and the rest as they say is history.
Today, 500 million Twinkies are sold annually (according to the Chicago Tribune) – the equivalent of 30,758 miles of cream filled sponge cake – which is proof positive that Americans must really be clueless regarding exactly what we’re really putting into our bodies. Shouldn’t we all be wondering how a baked item can possibly require 39 ingredients to come to fruition, plus last 25 days on a store shelf without getting rock hard? The secret is in Twinkies’ lack of dairy-based ingredients, not to mention a whole host of curiously bizarre, highly processed chemical and mineral components, including petroleum and rocks. Now that you’re paying attention, let’s run down the list of what exactly makes a Twinkie taste like a Twinkie…and then feel free to re-evaluate where you stand on this beloved bit of gorge-worthy junk food later.
Twinkies Contain Real Food!
Despite popular myth, the cakes actually do contain certain choice ingredients found in nature, such as eggs, sugar, enriched wheat flour and pure water. They couldn’t all be bad now, could they? In fact, Twinkies contain a full 2% of the recommended daily amount of iron as well as 1 full gram of protein (let’s just ignore the fact that each cake contains 2000 milligrams of salt, 25 grams of carbohydrates and 20 milligrams of cholesterol). Some indulgences are worth their weight in taste bud seducing goodness…am I right? Hello?? Anyone?!?
Twinkies Contain a Lot of Funky Business, Too!
Oh drats. This isn’t good news at all. In addition to being filled with high fructose corn syrup – which a Princeton University study says is likely to trigger obesity compared to simple table sugar – the cakes are also made with cellulose gum (the same product used to create laxatives, K-Y Jelly, household paints and laundry detergents), sodium stearol lactylate (also used to make chewing gum and liqueurs) and soy lecithin (which is an animal and plant-derived yellow-brownish fatty substance). Still, I’m oddly undeterred because there’s nothing quite like a face full of Twinkies to smother away the troubles of the big bad world outside.
Twinkies Contain Rocks!
Well, to be perfectly honest, so do many other junk foods. Anytime you add baking soda to a product, you’re obtaining it from soda ash or trona ore, both of which deposited deep between the Earth’s shale and sandstone layers. So, this really isn’t anything to freak out about (despite the fact that it’s the same stuff used to create tracer bullets and incendiary bombs). Fortunately, it works equally as well as a leavening agent and will probably put a little hair on your chest, too, so…lemme at ‘em. Twinkies, I hear you calling…
Twinkies Contain Fossil-Fuel Based Ingredients!!
If you’re thinking “bleccckhh!”, then join the club. Yes, when you nibble the irresistible buttery sponge cake of a Twinkie, you are indeed consuming petroleum derived artificial flavors and sorbic acid, which is distilled with a petroleum carrier and happens to serve as a marvelous food preservative that prevents yeast, fungus and mold from growing. The addictive cream center of a Twinkie is no better since it contains petroleum-based polysorbate 60 and artificial vanillin, the latter of which is cooked up in petrochemical plants. This is soooo not cool. I’m seriously going to submit to a junk food lobotomy so I can break the habit a lot easier….oh, but look at its goldeny sheen and glistening, come-hither cream filling…sigh. This is going to be a lot harder than I imagined.
Twinkies Contain a Whole Slew of Fats!
Derived from simple vegetable oil, the host of mono and diglycerides found in Twinkie cake batter work together to create softer baked product that uses less fat overall since these ingredients enhance what is already in the mix. Hey, every human body needs a little fat to make things operate properly…why should this be bad news?!? These very same components have also been used to make ammunition when glycerin supplies were very low between the 1920s and 1940s. Unfortunately, Twinkies also contain palm oil, which in recent years has been in such great demand that rainforest and peatland ecosystems are now seriously threatened along with native species like Orangutans which depend on it for their survival. Grrr. Hatin’ Twinkies a little more despite wanting to absolve my emotional turmoil by plowing through a full dozen.
Twinkies Contain a Bit of Moo Essence!
Alright, that’s it. It’s all over for me and my Twinkie crush. Vegetarians the world over probably know by now that America’s favorite snack cake contains rendered beef fat (otherwise known as tallow) in its shortening blend. The solid white, surprisingly trans-fat-free is also what McDonald’s used up until 1990 to create their signature French fries with, but the material has other popular applications, such as in the creation of biodiesel, soap, lubrication for the steel rolling industry and soldering flux. Pumping Twinkies full of solidified rendered cow fat is 1000 kinds of wrong – even if you’re a meat eater, would you be totally cool dipping your bacon in maple…wait a second…bad example. Fine, just look at this heart-palpitating graphic revealing every single item that Hostess manages to cram into their Twinkies (courtesy of Visual Ingredients). If you still think that it’s a good idea to swallow rather than spit, I pity da Twinkie-lovin’ fool….my hopelessly addicted self included.
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