I stopped and bought a package of Twinkies on my way to work to celebrate National Twinkies Day.  I started thinking about all the jokes about our beloved Twinkies and its reputation of being, well, a horrible thing to put in your body. So, before I suck these bad boys down, I wanted to see what’s in there.

Twinkies debuted in 1930 and was originally banana flavored. Due to banana rationing in World War II, Hostess changed the flavor to vanilla.  There have been a “few” more changes over the years. Twinkies of today are choc full of things that are hard to pronounce, a lot of things we probably shouldn’t be eating. The shelf life of Twinkies is 45 days. 45 DAYS? That in itself should scare the crap out of you. So, what is in a Twinkies anyway. Well, the web site Ingredient Inspector, had this to say:

“Twinkies are made using Bleached Flour, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Artificial Flavor, 2 Artificial Colors, 2 Chemical Preservatives and Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate. Soybean Oil, Cottonseed Oil, Polysorbate 60 and Cellulose Gum are also on the long ingredient list.”

See what I’m mean by a lot of hard to pronounce words?  Kinda sounds like a high school chemistry project.

Hostess is suggesting you eat your twinkies within 45 days.  But how long will twinkies last? Some say, so far, 48 years. In 1976, a chemistry teacher at George Stevens Academy, in Blue Hill, Maine, put a Twinkie on a chalkboard to see how long it would take to decompose. The Twinkie still looks fresh and now sits in a glass case at the school. Other than a slight change in color, the Twinkie still looks the same.

Now, I’m not sure I want to eat my Twinkies, it’s ok, I have at least 40 days to decide.

Here is a story from a few years ago about the experiment.