twinkies

This sight - poised somewhere between dismal and terrifying - greeted me when i walked into our Chair's office this morning.   Is this what a Chair's diet sinks to?   Is this the new budget-conscious offering for hungry faculty?   

Twinkies, for me, exist in some kind of world of cultural mythology - a standby of American fiction, but I don't think I'd ever met one face to face before.    This may mark me down as foreign.     But even though I'll try most culinary experiences - once -  (there were, for example, some rather tasty and crunchy deep-fried mealy-worm grubs in Thailand, though admittedly I passed on the cockroaches) I couldn't face one of these.   I learned my lesson last year, in North Carolina: again, reading had taught me to expect a Moonpie to be some kind of southern delicacy - maybe not grits, maybe not a peach cobbler, but worth a try.    But.    I don't think I will ever have any comprehension of anyone who voluntarily chooses to put sweet styrofoam sandwiched between two slices of soggy cardboard anywhere near their mouth - and I have a very strong suspicion that a Twinkie would fall in the same category.

Twinkies, it seems, were invented in 1930, and originally had a banana cream filling - that sounds more nasty than one could believe - until a banana shortage during WW2 led to the substitution of vanilla innards.   Steve Ettlinger has written a book called Twinkie, Deconstructed, that looks in detail at all the ingredients that go into this monstrously artificial beast.   There is some stuff on line about deep-fried Twinkies - which look set to rival that traditional Glaswegian food, the deep-fried Mars Bar.   (Ettlinger's title also, for that matter, looks like my #1 candidate for misuse of the word "deconstruction," but I'll let that pass, since it looks like a fun read).