Twinkies Are Turning 65 This Year

What staple of the American diet did James A. Dewar invent in 1930? No, it wasn’t Scotch. Here are some clues: Its original recipe was changed because of the banana shortage of the ‘40s.

Howdy Doody, Clarabell the Clown and Buffalo Bob hawked it in the ‘50s.

Archie Bunker called it “white man’s soul food” in the ‘70s, the same decade it helped San Francisco City Supervisor Dan White beat a murder rap.

And in the ‘90s, tobacco moguls testified before Congress that a cigarette was no more harmful or addictive than it was.

Give up?

The answer, of course, is the Twinkie, the quintessential junk food, which celebrates its 65th birthday this year.

There’s a lot more to a Twinkie than meets the tongue. Twinkies and Americans have a complex psychological relationship.

Every minute of every day, we eat another 951 of them. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel guilty about it.

Indeed, there’s something about these unadorned snack cakes with the gooey vanilla cream innards that muscles around the darker furniture of our souls.

The invention of the Twinkie is an event befogged by mystery.

We know that Dewar invented Twinkies in Chicago, which to this day is the No. 1 Twinkie-eating city in the nation (3.6 Twinkies per capita per year).

And we know how they got their name: On a business trip to St. Louis, Dewar saw a billboard advertising “Twinkle Toe Shoes.”

But officials at the Continental Baking Co. say no one knows the exact date of their invention or, more important, what inspired Dewar to inject them with banana-cream filling.

These facts have been lost forever, says Continental spokeswoman Kerry Lyman, because “frankly, I think back then no one ever expected it to take off and become the Twinkie as we know it today.”

No one, in other words, ever imagined that Americans would eat more than 40 billion of them, enough to build a sidewalk to the moon.

But at the same time, we have heaped upon them more than their fair share of abuse.

When tobacco industry spokesmen told Congress last year that cigarettes are no more harmful or addictive than Twinkies (a backhanded compliment if ever there was one), Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., replied: “Twinkies don’t kill people.”

Don’t tell that to Martin Blinder.

Blinder was the psychiatrist who invented the infamous “Twinkie Defense.”

When Dan White pumped San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk full of bullets in 1978, he was charged with murder. But a jury found him guilty on the lesser charge of manslaughter after Blinder testified that White’s diet - Twinkies, potato chips and Coca-Cola - pushed him over the edge.

In other words, the Twinkies made him do it.

What is it about Twinkies, anyway? Why do they get the blame, and not the potato chips or the Coke?

It can only be because there is something about Twinkies that pushes buttons in us that other junk foods do not.

A deconstruction of the Twinkie might go something like this:

First, there is a certain unabashed nakedness about them. Compared to other snack cakes, Twinkies are the most unadorned: no frosting, no sprinkles, no shame.

This nakedness is a slap at our Puritan underpinnings. It is one thing to sin, quite another to sin without shame.

This shamelessness may be the very thing that draws us to the Twinkie, that makes us select it from among the host of other tarted-up snack cakes on the convenience store shelf. (We do, in fact, eat more Twinkies than any other Hostess snack cake.)

What, after all, is more attractive than sin without shame?

Yes, we love them, but their power over us fills us with fear and gnawing guilt. Twinkies, after all, are bad for us, aren’t they?

“Hey, they’re a snack,” says Lyman. “No one, especially us, is saying that Twinkies should be your meal. It’s simply a snack and an addition to what I hope would be an otherwise healthy diet.”

Note the word “otherwise.”

Actually, there has been at least one argument made for their healthfulness.

In Bicycling magazine, author Ellen Coleman wrote that if you’re a cyclist on the road with no place to lunch but a nearby convenience store, Twinkies are not the worst choice you could make.

“The ideal cycling food should be at least 55 percent carbohydrate and no more than 30 percent fat,” she wrote.

“Believe it or not, the best choice in (the pastry) category may be that old junk-food standard, Twinkies. That’s right, two of them provide (about) 286 calories - 68 percent from carbohydrate and only 26 percent from fat.”

And then there is the example of Jimmy Dewar, himself reputedly a two-Twinkie-a-day man who died at the respectable age of 88 and who once defended Twinkies by saying he fed them to his four children who, in turn, fed them to his 15 grandchildren.

“Twinkies,” he said, “never hurt them.”

Twinkie Casserole

If you spend your every waking hour before a computer screen, then you’re probably familiar with this Twinkie-in-cheek recipe from “Giga Bites: The Hacker Cookbook” (Ten Speed Press)

2 dozen Twinkies

1 large jar caramel topping

1 bag miniature marshmallows

1 large jar hot fudge sauce

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 large bag Oreos

Dash of brown sugar

Line the bottom of a casserole dish or large plate with the Twinkies. Pour the caramel topping evenly over the Twinkies, and smooth with a knife.

Pour the miniature marshmallows over the caramel until it is completely hidden. Pour the hot fudge over the marshmallows. Sprinkle the spices over the hot fudge. Layer the Oreos on top of the casserole. Serve immediately.

Yield: 2 or 3 servings.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: And now starring your favorite Twinkie… To celebrate their 65th anniversary, Hostess has asked Twinkies fans for home movies starring the snack cakes. John Lehndorff of the Boulder Daily Camera offers some possible plots: “Forrest Twinkie”: A dull boy runs really fast after his mom makes him eat Twinkies for breakfast, lunch and dinner and lives an exciting life anyway. In the touching final scene, Forrest (played by John Travolta) tells his son: “Life is like a package of Twinkies. You always know for sure what you’re gonna get every single time.” “Twinkie Fiction”: A criminal couple (played by Tom Hanks and Jodie Foster) consume 10 Twinkies apiece, causing them to do the sensual Twinkie dance and forget to go out and kill people as planned. “Interview with a Twinkie”: Two vampires (played by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh) suck the cream out of 100 fresh Twinkies in the mistaken belief that it would infuse them with longevity, but they just end up as overweight, middle-aged white guys. “The Twinkie King”: A prince of a boy (voice by Macaulay Culkin) tries to earn the respect of his father (voice by Paul Newman) by teaching his clan to consume fresh, cream-filled snack cakes and singing happy pop songs instead of chasing down animals and biting them until they die.