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Sunday, November 25, 2012

Is this the end of the Twinkie?

There is some disturbing news coming out of the United States.
Is it more dire financial distress? Is another natural disaster going to clobber our neighbours? Did another general get caught with his pants down (literally)?
No, this news struck at the very heart of America and is dominating coffee-shop talk throughout the land: the Twinkie is in peril.
Say it isn't so.
For generations the Twinkie has been contributing to obesity, diabetes, zits and rotten teeth, and for a while it looked like it may disappear forever.
Hostess, which also make a variety of other sugar-laden, empty calorie filled goodies, is kaput. Rising labour costs, more competition and the trend toward healthier eating means the company is toast. I do have some doubts about that last claim based on the girth of our Yankee cousins, but that’s what the news story said.
The good news is Twinkie's have a shelf life of 4,000 years, so whatever Twinkies that have already been made will be around for generations to come.
For a brief while it looked like the Twinkie would go the way of the Dodo, but the company that first turned on its ovens in the late 1800s will sell off some of its more popular treats such King Dons, Ho Hos and the mighty Twinkie.
I must admit I contributed to the demise of the once-grand company. While I do have a sweet tooth (or several teeth actually) I have never been a fan of the Twinkie.
As a child, I did not have access to the cream-filled golden cake snack. You just could not find them in Canada way back then.
I finally had the chance to try one when my family went on one of our marathon family vacations deep into the United States, but the thrill eluded me – as it does to this day.
The Twinkie is probably the best-known pastry in the world and I was excited to sink all my sweet teeth into the legendary snack, but after sampling it with eager anticipation the highest I could rate the plastic-wrapped sugar bomb was meh, whatever.
The Twinkie may have been a bust, but those annual vacations did open my eyes to wonders of what a foreign land had to offer.
Many hours were spent in the back of the family station wagon, staring out the window and occasionally making obscene gestures to the passing cars (without our parents seeing us of course.)
For a kid, the U.S. looked a lot like Canada, until we stopped for gas or at a campground for the night. That was when I had a chance to see just how different our countries were.
It was not the people, houses, or landscape I was interested in, but the candy (and briefly the Twinkies.) The United States had different candy than Canada did back in the 1970s.
I could have cared less about the political upheaval rocking the nation. I just wanted to see what kind of treats they had that could not be found in my homeland.
There were plenty to choose from and I did my best to sample all the exotic bundles of sugar every chance I got. But as the family grew older, the road trips ended and my forays into the United States of Candyland were put on hold for many years.
But a few years ago we gathered the flock and headed to Disneyland. While the Magic Kingdom was all it promised, the candy situation was very disappointing: it was pretty much all the same stuff we had up here.
What the heck? What is going on? Globalization had struck and most of the American candy rack looked the same as the Canadian candy rack, or visa-versa.
There were a few different chocolate bars and whatnot, but the bounty of strange and foreign treats was gone forever.
Gone is another childhood memory that can never be relived, or re-eaten.

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