Thursday, July 17, 2008

Twinkies, How long do they last?

Twinkies do not last forever...sadly in retrospect what will we eat if there is a nuclear disaster? I have been blessed with having grown up in a town that had a Twinkie Factory in it, so it was an annual class outing , well that and the cigarette/toilet paper factory on the other side of town, you really may want to rethink that smoke. We would board our yellow school buses and go off to the factory a quick 8 minute trip. I remember looking at all of those buses all lined up outside the factory and thinking that they were like large Twinkies. But we went through the factory watching the eggs mix with the ingredients and soon thousands of little yellow cakes would appear traveling down wide belts cooling before they would get poked with three stainless tubes and forced to swell up with fake but very tasty cream. Yes that was a yearly class trip, now everyone got a Twinkie at the end of the tour. I suppose that was to make up for our hours of boredom, we had already done this tour before. Well I was never Twinkie girl lets just leave it at that, I prefer Devil Dogs and they are made for Drakes and well that's for another day.
But the mystery and urban lore continues, how long will it last? Hostess the maker of Twinkies says 25 days. That is still pretty long in the food shelf life world unless of course it is canned. It seems that Twinkies lack dairy which extends the shelf life, however they do not contain enough "chemicals" to make it to much longer. I am tempted to get a twinkie and wait a month or two and try it out.
Twinkies were created in 1930 and named after a Billboard advertising "Twinkle Toe Shoes", see the resemblance now? Ahh. Twinkies were originally filled with Banana cream but when WWII broke out there was a Banana shortage and white cake icing was substitute. It was cheaper and people loved it well that was that.
According to the Hostess people it takes 8 million pounds of sugar, 7 million pounds of flour and 1 million eggs to make 5 million Twinkies.

Trivia: It takes 45 seconds in the microwave to blowup a Twinkies.

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Politics and Fido

...a Latin name meaning "I am faithful." As such it is a terrific name for the average protective and loyal family dog. However, it gets its popularity from a celebrity tie-in. Apparently, Abraham Lincoln, a largely self-educated but very erudite man, named his dog Fido. Americans followed suit in droves, putting the dog name Fido firmly in the top 20 names. Lincoln’s choice of Fido for his dog’s name was perfectly logical. Fido is the Latin for faithful, which when dealing with any pet dog is entirely appropriate