Here's where Twinkies take over the whole narrative. Screw hydrogenated oils. Screw trans fats (of which, by some work of God or lawyering, Twinkie boxes report none), screw the book on my desk called Sugar Shock. A Twinkie, I rediscovered, is a wad of sugar and hydrogenated oils sent straight from heaven or Bobby Flay. I used to be partial to something called a Little Debbie Star Crunch, I had a romance with the peeling chocolate outer layer of Ding-Dongs, I've felt a Southern birthright obligation to swoon for Moon Pies, but my recent research brings me to the most solid conviction I've had about anything in my adult life: A Twinkie is the best crap food ever.
Spoken in the language of the Twinkie box, to which my writing, reporting and editing career has sunk, the Twinkie is the best "golden sponge cake with cream filling" ever.
Other virtues I must extol: They come individually wrapped in plastic; like a sister to the most beloved of cheese food products, American cheese. This is an era we shouldn't forget—perhaps it was inspired by the Space Age—wrap it in plastic! Better! A Twinkie is bouncy. Drop a Twinkie and it has the good spirit not to splat. And most importantly—I can't stress this enough—is the astoundingly delicious white-sugar-oil-processed-cream-food-product in the middle that makes a tongue very, very happy. And what else is life about, if not a happy tongue? Here, then, is a list of other crap food I momentarily imagined would be lost in the healthier-America shuffle. I rank them based on highly scientific criteria including appearance, length of mysterious ingredient list, longevity on the marketplace, and ridiculous success in edible chemical flavor.
1. Hostess Twinkie.
2. Lay's Sour Cream and Onion Artificially Flavored Potato Chips. Baked chips suck. Greasy, salty, chock-full of "buttermilk solids" and lactose, these are the best. Bonus: leaves you fingers lickable.
3. Hostess Sno Balls. Here's where appearance makes half the case. Sometimes, they're hot pink. In the fall, you can order them in orange. In any case, they're creamy filling inside chocolate cake, a irreproachable start, covered in marshmallow and coconut. Messy.
4. Sour Punch Straws. Not a classic, but I'm sneaking them in as a new, disgusting, totally devoid of nutrition favorite. Sticky spaghetti-like strings of colored corn syrup covered in granular sugar and infused with some sour chemical so strong you pucker.
5. Hostess Cup Cakes: The chocolate-and-cream classic, still delicious after all these years. Let's take a moment here to give everlasting kudos to Hostess' unapologetic love of snack cakes. In the Hostess Cup Cake Bio on their site (every crap food should have a loving bio!), Hostess celebrates: "The captain of them all! Call it a cupcake caper: mystery surrounds who invented the original Hostess Cup Cake in 1919, although it was baking executive D.R. 'Doc' Rice, who, in 1950 added the signature seven squiggles and vanilla-crème filling—a move that created the best selling snack cake in history."
6. Cap'n Crunch Crunchberries cereal. Just pour me a bowl of crunchy sugar in cold milk, and I'm a happy woman. Ties with Cap'n Crunch Peanut Butter Cereal, which more than once I've eaten an entire box of in one day. You know you have, too.
7. Moon Pies. Microwaved—microwaving being a sure sign of haute cuisine—these cakey cookies smoosh marshmallow cream and, for me, bring a sense of sweet-tooth nostalgia.
8. Little Debbie Star Crunch Cosmic Snacks. A chewy cookie material topped with fake-ish caramel and crisp rice bits then covered in a layer of flakey fudgy stuff. "Available individually wrapped in an eight or twelve count carton."
9. Zingers, Fruity Pebbles, any kind of cinnamon roll/honey bun pre-packaged in total goo, those fruit pies that are hard, sugar-coated pie crust on the outside and filled mostly with red gel and about three cherries on the inside ...
10. Pop Tarts. Self-explanatory.