An Ode to the Twinkee

I come not to bury the Twinkee, but to praise it.

If you haven’t heard already, Hostess, the company that makes Twinkees, Ho-Hos, Wonder Bread, and other assorted products has gone out of business.

You can read about it here.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/49852161

This isn’t a simple tale of unions bad, management good. The teamsters agreed to dramatic wage cuts, but a small bakers union refused. They thought that the company’s threat to close down the plants was just that, a threat.

They were wrong. It wasn’t a bluff. Today, management laid off 18,000 workers. Now, it’s possible that the Twinkee brand could come back, under a different company. Knowing its popularity and ease to make, it’s unlikely that it will stay dead for long.

And yet…

I think this is an example of a trend long brewing in America. As consumers become increasingly health conscious, they are shifting away from consuming cheaper, iconic goods such as Twinkees and instead buying more organic hummus, all natural pinto beans, and whatever else is trendy. In my lifetime, I have seen food evolve into an identifier of class. Where you shop, what you eat, and what brands you consume are increasingly correlated with what class you identify with. The rich and the poor have always had different tastes. But call me naïve, I think that there used to be much more of a unified cuisine in America. The rich, the middle, and to an extent the poor would eat the same meat, potato, and vegetable dishes. The source of such goods wasn’t as important as it is today. Starting around the seventies, I’d say, this started to fragment.

If you are gloating, if you are one of those ever so healthy tofu eating bohemians now laughing at the demise of the calorie heavy, nutritionally lacking Twinkee, I offer a word of caution.

America was built on the backs of Twinkees. I don’t say this ironically or sarcastically. The country, wide and fierce, still in many parts wild, was gradually tamed and civilized through the efforts of dirty people, unsophisticated people, rough people. An ever increasing share of my generation would never work in a hot factory, a hell like steel mill, or in some other physically intense line of work. Machines have taken these jobs. Millions and millions of difficult labor intensive jobs have been automated or outsourced, leaving us with fields and fields of air conditioned office parks.

The people who worked these jobs needed energy, and quickly. They had neither the time, nor the money, nor the inclination to shop around for organic this, natural that. They needed calories, and they needed them fast.

Now we sit in our cubicles, having the luxury of both money and time. To those fortunate enough to have the resources available to eat healthier, to be a part of bourgeoisie, don’t look down upon the Twinkee eaters. The Twinkee eaters drive your trucks, they work your sewers, they pave your roads. The Twinkee eats clean your offices and homes, they stock your stores, they do all of those jobs that you would consider beneath you. To all of the yuppies out there, safe in your Whole Foods markets, only encountering a Twinkee when you step inside of a 7-11, to you I say join with me in mourning the death of the Twinkee. A part of America, ever so silly, ever so irrational, but ever so important to defining who we are, has died today.