Twinkies are returning to grocery shelves on July 15, and it is not a moment too soon. Since the snack cakes ceased production last November, thousands of Americans have been up in arms—at least in a feigned, ironic-Facebook-post sort of way. In trying to uncover the story behind Twinkies—their disappearance, reappearance and what happened in between—our reporter was left nearly unconscious on the floor of her apartment. Let us retrace the steps that led to her near-fatal rendezvous with the snack cakes:
1. Hostess Twinkies are invented in River Forest, Illinois on April 6, 1930 as a log-shaped spongecake treat with cream filling. People eat them, enjoy them, then forget about them for several decades.
2. The 2009 hit film Zombieland ignites in its viewers a cultish obsession with Twinkies as they watch Woody Harrelson’s character search feverishly for the cream-filled spongecake snack cakes in a zombie apocalypse. Bizarrely foreshadowing the American landscape (minus the whole zombie thing) of just a few years later, Harrelson utters these lines: “Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date. Some day very soon, life’s little Twinkie gauge is gonna go empty.”
3. After nearly going under a handful of times, Hostess officially files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announces Twinkies and the other cakes will cease production in the United States in November of 2012.
4. In the wake of the Twinkie collapse, Santa Cruz’s own Boardwalk deep-fried Twinkie stand adopts knockoff Twinkies, codename “Dreamies.” Audiences are not pleased, according to one teenage deep-fried Twinkies stand employee. “As soon as people ask and I tell them it’s an off-brand, they get upset,” he says. “They just see that it’s not the Hostess dancing cowboy guy and it’s like, they don’t like it.”
5. In March, private equity firms Apollo Group Management and Metropoulos & Co., owners of hipster idol beverage Pabst Blue Ribbon, purchase Hostess and its recipes, promising to return Twinkies to shelves on July 15.
6: Our reporter decides to investigate how the Twinkie resurgence will affect the Boardwalk deep-fried Twinkie stand, which she visits on an extraordinarily hot Wednesday afternoon in June, where she inquires what the off-brand Twinkies taste like. The teenage employee is unequivocal: “No difference. No difference. Exactly the same.”
7. A couple—Ron and Kim Baioni, from Sacramento—approach the Twinkie stand, looking for Twinkies. Disheartened, they leave upon hearing there are only knockoffs. Ron tells the reporter, “I’ve tried a few of them, and they just had a weird…they don’t taste the same. They taste more plastic-y, more fake. It doesn’t taste like a cake. Especially the frosting is just, ugh.” He suspects the Twinkie knockoffs are made “in who knows where… And I’m like, ehh…it’s probably okay, but I’m not gonna try it.” Once the Baioni’s are out of earshot, the teenage employee shakes his head and says he “guarantees” the reaction is psychological.
8. Determining she must find out for herself, our reporter purchases one deep-fried Dreamie, made fresh for her. Upon taking the first bite, she glimpses the gates of heaven. It is like she has never tasted anything so glorious. Deep-fried dough is a drug of its own, she supposes. Chasing that first high, she consumes the Dreamie in its entirety. Then she feels like crap, and spends the rest of the day in a trancelike hangover. Regarding whether Dreamies taste different than Twinkies, the reporter is not sure. She thinks Dreamies have a thicker cake, less fluffy than Twinkies. But she has not had a Twinkie since, like, the fourth grade. So.
9. Following up via telephone with Ken Whiting, the owner of the Boardwalk deep-fried Twinkie stand, the reporter learns that sales have been down since the switch to Dreamies. Whiting says he is “anxiously anticipating” the return of Twinkies, which he suspects will be later this summer.
10. Back at the Dreamie stand, the teenage employee says customers have been excited to hear the news about Twinkies’ return: “Like, I don’t see why they’re so happy. It’s still, like, terrible food,” he says. “But whatever makes people happy.”
