Twinkies are dead, long live Twinkies

I was definitely one of those kids who ate Hostess cakes when I was a kid. Twinkies were not my favorite necessarily; I tended to favor the chocolate (or in modern parlance, chocolaty) products. Yes, products more than strictly cakes. My favorites were Ring Dings (aka DingDongs) and Yodels, which had a shiny chocolaty coating, chocolate cake and creme filling. Devil Dogs, named I believe not after Cerberus (kind of like Fluffy from the first Harry Potter book but in Hell) but a type of chocolate cake with the provocative name of devil's food, were hot dog-shaped and less delicious.

But any discussion of Hostess Cakes has to come down to it's iconic brand, Twinkies. I read a book last year called Twinkie Deconstructed, where a man tracks down the origin of all 21 ingredients in a Twinkie. I recommend this book for anyone interested in food. It was very enlightening and cast a new light on the, let's just say extraordinary shelf life of Twinkies.

When I was in college, there were urban legends about the properties of Twinkies- that someone pasted one to their wall for an entire school year only to find its texture unaltered- that kind of thing. After reading the book, all of that became clear because I learned that Twinkies were developed specifically to be a cream puff (puffy pastry filled with whipped cream for those with poor deductive skills) with long-lasting properties. The problem with cream puffs from a bakery is that first the pastry gets stale and then the cream soaks through it turning it to a soggy mess. That's why "creme" filling was invented- to stay moist but not soak through the cake. Of course the cake also had to be modified to repel moisture.

So they were designed to last as long as possible, making it possible for stores to keep them on the shelves for days or weeks rather than hours. They were (and still are) a marvel of food technology.

The decline of Hostess traces originally to changing consumer tastes, as is the case with many declining brands. More recently, it was a victim of what became popularly known during the presidential campaign as "vulture capitalism." This is a pun on the financial term, venture capitalism, where investors supply the necessary funds for a company to grow and expand. In vulture capitalism, investors buy a struggling company for the purpose of extracting as much money as possible from it before leaving it to die. It's more like vampire capitalism, but I guess we've had our fill of vampire references these days. If you want a more complete and less opinionated description of the process, read here.

The most recent owners, known euphemistically as turnaround artists, had Hostess take on a crushing amount of debt, leaving it unable to modernize or pay decent wages. Eventually, the workers went on strike over having their paychecks slashed drastically for a second time. The owners declare bankruptcy and close the company, keeping as much of the money generated and borrowed as possible. This kind of thing is what Mitt Romney famously did for a living at Bain Capital before he got his new job whining about how people with a thousandth of a percent as much money as he has want things.

Longterm, most of those workers have permanently lost their jobs. Other companies already in the business of making cakes unaffected by the passage of time will bid for the famous brand name. The company that bought Tastykakes is reportedly interested. The former owners will pay their lawyers and pocket the difference, so they'll have plenty of money to buy Twinkies whenever they make their return, which I'm betting will be before the ones I have in my cabinet get stale.