Happy Healthy YOU
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Kelly Spencer - Happy Healthy YOU
(A wellness column by Kelly Spencer: writer, life coach, yoga & meditation teacher, holistic healer and a mindful life enthusiast!)
A few years back we watched the movie Zombieland, a comedy-horror about, as one might guess, a zombie apocalypse. Woody Harrelson plays Tallahassee, a gun-toting tough guy trying to find the last Twinkie in America.
“There’s a box of Twinkies down in that Mini-Mart. Not just any box of Twinkies. The last box of Twinkies… that I… or anyone… will enjoy… for all of time… in the whole universe. ‘Cause there’s an expiration date on Twinkies. And the Hostess factories are gone. So someday very soon, life’s little Twinkie gauge is gonna hit Empty.” - Tallahassee
But do Twinkies actually have an expiration date?
The Twinkie is American owned by Hostess, marketed as a "golden sponge cake filled with creamy filling” and is actually produced in Montreal. Some reports state a half a billion of these confections are baked each year. And while there is a guaranteed fresh date on the package this should not be confused with an expiry date.
Natural Resource Defense Council’s Dana Gunders states “…the ‘expiration date’ is not an indicator of when you can eat your food; it’s an indicator of when the brand is willing to stand behind that food.” The date is printed on a product “so that you can have the peak consumer experience with it. No one is pretending that you can’t eat that product after the date - that it’s bad, that it’s going to make you sick.”
But with expiry dates or fresh shelf life dates on Twinkies of 21 days and claims of indestructibility, what is in these golden cakes?
Hostess estimates it uses eight million pounds of sugar, seven million pounds of flour, and one million eggs to produce the 500 million Twinkies baked every year. But is it just sugar, wheat and eggs?
It’s a question that’s dogged Steve Ettlinger for years. The author of the book “Twinkie, Deconstructed” spent months of his life interviewing chemical engineers, questioning industrial bakers and even traveling 1,600 feet below the surface of the Earth to see where Twinkie ingredients are mined. (Yes, that’s right…mined.)
So yes, there are the ingredients previous listed but there is also a whole lot of other stuff that I don’t even think we can classify as food.
This led to Ettinger’s project “37 or so ingredients.” Each photograph is an aerial view of a round glass plate that contains a single Twinkie ingredient in its raw form, from the highly identifiable (wheat flour) to the highly chemical (FD&C Yellow #5). Ettlinger dug and dug until he understood what terms such as Polysorbate 60, Red 40, mono and diglycerides and calcium sulfate really meant. (FYI: Calcium sulfate is a food-grade equivalent of plaster of Paris and Red 40 contains p-Cresidine, which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says is “reasonably anticipated” to be a human carcinogen or cause of cancer.)
Urban legend states that Twinkies don’t ever expire and that they could even survive a nuclear war. What? I started my investigation into this myth one year ago this week.
In fact one year ago my daughter and I went on a road trip. One place we spent time in was New York City. As a joke, she bought her brother a NYC Twinkie as a tourist gift. We can’t remember why but probably something to do with that rarity of my kids seeing these processed bagged lunch cakes.
My son tore open the package, grabbed one of the dual “cakes” and bit into it. After a couple bites he declared their nastiness and left the other one of the counter. Later that day we were sitting around the kitchen island where the leftover Twinkie lay exposed with no wrapping. We decided to put our small dogs on the counter to see what they would do with it. They sniffed around and licked the counter in other areas but never went near the Twinkie. One of them looked at it, sniffed and turned away. I was so amused but somehow not really shocked. I took a video.
I had a friend once that took a fast-food hamburger and a homemade hamburger and put them on her counter as part of a project with her child. Within several days the homemade burger started to turn color. The fast-food burger? Nothing. After a couple of weeks, the homemade burger started to stink and rot so she threw it out. Drive-thru burger still had zero change to look, smell or composition. They kept it for a few months and got sick of looking at it, so they tossed the processed meat patty in its utterly unchanged form.
I decided to test the decomposition of the lone Twinkie my son didn’t eat. I left it on the counter for a few weeks, where it actually stayed a little bit moist and soft despite being exposed to the air with no wrapper. I guessed it would get moldy and shrivel much like a piece of bread.
Long story short, I still have it. My family got sick of looking at it, so we put it in the kitchen cupboard. I loved that every time we got a dish out, we saw this unchanged “food”. My husband asked me a dozen times over the months “how long are we keeping this Twinkie for?” I agreed one year.
It is the one year anniversary of the indestructible Twinkie. No change in color. No change in size. It is dry but void of mold or any signs of decomposition or disintegrating - or of still being edible.
Ettlinger said he was astounded by what he learned - particularly his finding that Twinkies’ ingredients are “manufactured with fourteen of the top twenty chemicals made in the U.S.” And while Twinkies may just be the cockroach of the snack food world, the fact is there aren’t any more chemicals in them then tens of thousands of other food products out there. "It is absolutely typical of all processed foods," says Steve Ettlinger.
In 1976, a chemistry teacher at George Stevens Academy in Maine wanted to see how long it would take for a fresh Twinkie to decompose. He unwrapped it, put it on the chalkboard, and 40 years later, that question is still unanswered, as mold simply refuses to grow on the world’s oldest Twinkie.
“The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.”- Ann Wigmore
Eat real food. Eat whole food. Eat organic food. Consume food with ingredients that you can pronounce and ingredients that are food, not chemicals. I invite you to take one step in this direction today.
(If you would like to see an article on a specific topic, please email kelly@indigolounge.ca)