Twinkies



39 Ingredients, Most of Which Aren't Food

 According to Wikipedia, Hostess Brands, Inc is the largest wholesale baker and distributor of bakery products in the United States, and is the owner of the Hostess, Wonder Bread,  Nature's Pride, Dolly Madison, Butternut Breads, and Drake's brands. For many years it was based at 12 East Armour Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri. After it emerged from bankruptcy in 2009 it moved to Irving, Texas.  It declared Chapter 11 again in 2012.



Mmmmm, Sheet Rock

This saddens me.  I grew up near the Hostess plant in Kansas City and when I was a young boy my mother would sometimes drive to their little outlet store where they sold soon-to-expire baked treats at a huge discount.  My favorites were the Hostess Cupcake (properly eaten inside out somewhat like an Oreo) and the Banana Dream (sort of a sideways Twinkie with a banana flavored "cream" filling.)  I air quote the term "cream" because I once did some research and found that the filling was actually unnaturally sweetened shortening.  Other stuff in Hostess snack cakes include sorbic acid as a preservative (it comes from natural gas), artificial colors and flavorings from petroleum, (what's with all this fuel?) and calcium sulfate, which is used in sheet rock.


Pink Slime


Despite these unexpected revelations, I have always had a soft spot for Hostess brands except for the dreaded Sno Ball; its garish pinkness really disturbed my sense of aesthetics.  But I loved fluffy, white Wonder Bread (Builds Strong Bodies Twelve Ways!) and the aroma of it baking inside the factory on Armour Road is one of the headiest memories of my youth (we never referred to it as Armour Boulevard, though -- that would have been considered high falutin' back where I come from.)

Everyone says American kids are getting fatter and fatter, and our First Lady has made childhood obesity her personal challenge to conquer.  I wonder if we got away from all these natural, organic ingredients like unrefined sugar, cream from grass-fed cows, enriched flour from pesticide-free wheat, and farm eggs hand-harvested from free range chickens and went back to ingesting man made chemicals, food coloring and Chinese vitamins, would it solve the problem?  The kids I went to grammar school with were all normal sized--maybe because we were so jacked up on minerals and gasoline we ran around in circles for hours at a time.

I know we are currently in a Farm to Table movement and this sounds like heresy, but if we initiated a nation-wide return to foods of the sixties and called it Laboratory to Table, we might just slim down our youngsters and help a venerable bakery rise out of its financial woes. 

I don't know about you, but I am really Jonesing for some unnaturally sweetened shortening right now.