The Hostess With the Leastest

The United States is indeed a vast food desert, producing the kind of overprocessed, artificially flavored foodstuffs that Frenchmen urinate on and Rush Limbaugh is actually proud of (and his corpulent frame makes that very obvious).  But this week, the American diet became a little bit healthier and a little more wholesome when Hostess, the producer of the toxic Twinkie and the inedible Wonder bread, went out of business.  And, as much as I'd like to suggest that changing American tastes in food are responsible for the company's demise, the actual reason is that a strike called earlier this month by employees in the bakers' union crippled the firm and made it impossible to continue operations.

Good riddance, I say.  Except for their fruit pies, Hostess products were not quite particularly tasty or  satisfying.  Ho Hos were nothing more than stale miniature versions of Swiss rolls, which taste much better homemade (my Aunt Mary Clare could make a mean Swiss roll at Christmas time), Ding Dongs were a redundant variation of Ho Hos, and Twinkies were nowhere nearly as good as real sponge cake.  If Twinkies really tasted that good out of the wrapper, why did so many folks feel a need to order them deep-fried at state and county fairs all across America?  The only thing good I can say about Hostess snacks is that, when I was a kid, I remember they tasted fresher than Drake's snacks and, unlike Drake's products, didn't leave an aftertaste that felt like someone stuffed mothballs in your mouth.  Which is ironic in light of the 1998 takeover of Drake's by Hostess - then called Interstate Bakeries (Hostess was originally just a brand name) - although that didn't make Sunny Doodles any better.

Hostess's biggest crime against humanity, though, was Wonder, the Velveeta of bread.  Utterly tasteless, so soft it stuck to the roof of your mouth even without peanut butter on it, Wonder was as bland as the primary-color package it came in.  When people of color dismiss American suburban Caucasian culture as "white bread," this is where they got the term from.

The Twinkie, at least, may survive the end of Hostess, as rumors are now going around that another company is on the verge of buying the rights to it in order to continue producing it.  If that doesn't happen, Twinkie lovers will probably buy enough of the little sponge cakes to last a lifetime.  They'll be pleased to know that, thanks to all the chemicals in Twinkies, they'll probably last even longer than that.  Even if cockroaches don't survive nuclear war, there'll always be Twinkies.