By Lisa Abraham, Akron Beacon Journal –
The food lover in me is chastising the schoolgirl in me for even feeling this way.
Twinkies and Wonder Bread: The two products are, quite frankly, nothing to be proud of from a food perspective. Filled with sugar and preservatives, their shelf lives are so unnaturally long, they would probably be around with the cockroaches after a nuclear attack.
Three of the top five ingredients in Twinkies: sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup. Ugh.
It was just last year that I was making fun of Hostess for introducing a recipe for Thanksgiving corn-bread stuffing laced with toasted chunks of Twinkies.
And now, I’m grieving. Inside, I’m crying, no make that screaming: “Nooooooooooo …”
Say it ain’t so.
But reality can’t be denied.
Hostess announced on Friday that it intends to close its doors, shuttering plants across the country and eliminating more than 18,000 jobs.
How can this be? Will this slice of Americana really just slip away? No more Twinkies? No more Fruit Pies? No more Ho Hos?
We won’t know for sure for a while.
Hostess intends to liquidate its company. I’m sure there is someone out there who would be interested in purchasing the brands and their recipes to keep on making them. There had to have been a sales spike Friday when nostalgic folks swarmed local stores to buy every last scrap of baked goods marked Hostess.
Surely the folks at Little Debbie are sharpening their pencils.
Truth be told, my relationship with Hostess ended around the time I left eighth grade.
But for some reason, when faced with the thought of not being able to have Twinkies anymore, I wanted one. The brands have been with us for generations and have filled more lunch bags and boxes than we could begin to count.
So after an hour or so of lamenting with my co-workers, I was compelled to act.
As I pulled into Dave’s Market on East Exchange Street in Akron, Ohio, I watched shoppers leaving with cartfuls of grocery bags. Were they all filled with Twinkies? Would I be able to find one last Apple Pie, my personal favorite from my grade school days?
Once through the doors, I realized most of the shoppers were more concerned with buying turkeys than Twinkies, except for a co-worker I ran into, who also was on a Hostess quest. I’m at a grocery store just about every day. Did he really think he’d find the Twinkies before me?
My cart was brimming with several boxes of Twinkies and an assortment of Fruit Pies, CupCakes, Suzy Q’s, Ho Hos, and Donuts, when I turned the corner into the bread aisle and met Jim Nuznoff, a bread route salesman for Hostess for the past 15 years.
He was finishing stocking the racks with fresh loaves of Wonder Bread and Home Pride Buttertop Wheat, and stopped his work to chat about his future, the possible disappearance of the Hostess line and his job.
Someone would probably buy the brands and the recipes and keep on making them, he theorized.
But would they be the same? I wondered.
No reason why they wouldn’t be, Nuznoff reassured.
But he will be celebrating Thanksgiving facing unemployment.
Why was I feeling so sad about losing products I don’t even eat anymore?
We agreed that it was more about the loss of something we thought we could always count on. Whether we wanted them or not, we expect to see Twinkies and Wonder Bread on our store shelves. It is part of our American experience.
Back at my office with nearly $60 worth of snack cakes, folks milled around talking about their childhood lunches and nibbling on their favorites.
Hoarders filled up their desk drawers. Others talked about funding retirement accounts with the sale of Twinkies on eBay.
I ate my Apple Pie and quietly sank into a sugar coma, wondering if those pies had always been so sweet.
Would it be my last? Would it matter if it was?
For the first time, I read the ingredients on a box of Twinkies. “Enriched bleached wheat flour, water, sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated vegetable and/or animal shortening …”
Ugh.
I put an empty box up on a bookshelf where Twinkie the Kid will continue his ride, and I decided that I would miss the box more than what was in it.
