They started out back in 1930, an era when people actually paid attention to seasonality in foods.
James A. Dewar, who worked at Hostess predecessor Continental Baking Company in Schiller, Ill., wanted to find a way to use the bakery's shortbread pans year round. The shortbread was filled with strawberries, but strawberries were only available for a few weeks a year.
So he used the oblong pans to bake spongecakes, which he then filled with banana cream. Bananas were a more regular crop.
Twinkies once contained real fruit. Twinkies were created because of seasonality.
Then, World War II hit and rationing meant — say it with me — Yes! We have no bananas. And so was born the vanilla cream Twinkie, which was vastly more popular anyway.
Even then, there was a crafted element to these treats. The filling was added by hand using a foot pedal-powered pump. Pump too hard and the Twinkies exploded.
It was around this time that American food culture did an about face. It was an era when the industrialization and processing of cheap food wasn't just desired, it was glorified. Cans and chemicals could set you free.
Twinkies are the prototypical indestructible junk food. It was the sort of height to which American technological ingenuity could go to create a product that was almost entirely artificial, but gave the appearance of eclairs."
When Twinkies signed on as a sponsor of the "Howdy Doody" show during the 1950s, their cultural legacy was sealed. Taglines such as "The snacks with a snack in the middle" began etching themselves into generations of young minds and it was considered perfectly fine that Twinkie the Kid would lasso and drag children before stuffing his sugar bombs in their faces.
Sure, not all the attention was positive. Somewhere along the line, Twinkies became the butt of jokes, mostly about their perceived longevity (though Hostess staunchly maintains 25 days is the max). And not all associations were great. The so-called "Twinkie defense" came out of the 1979 murder trial of Dan White, whose lawyers included his junk food obsession among the evidence of his supposed altered state of mind.
Then something happened. Suddenly, Americans who for decades had been tone deaf to how food was produced suddenly started paying attention. Suddenly, products, that had so prospered by their artificiality, lost their allure. Even Hostess, has acknowledged that consumer concern about health and food quality changed the game.
http://news.yahoo.com/happens-twinki...--finance.html