Twinkies Are Toast!

That's it! Twinkies are toast!

After a run of grocery stores, no doubt the shelves where the junk food introduced when Boomer's were kids will soon have some other brand of sugar fix to offer.

But it won't be from the folks who brought us Wonder Bread and Hostess cupcakes.They've shut their doors and given all their workers pink slips.

Somewhere between 1948 and 1950 I sank my baby teeth into my first chocolate, cream- filled Hostess cupcake. A bakery truck used to drive to our door out on our Ohio farm, and the driver would gleefully write out a bill on those occasions when my brother and I would let him in the door and unload the goods. 

I would wash mine down with a glass of chocolate-flavored Ovaltine, while my grandmother would lecture me about not chewing my food enough to let the digestive enzymes from my saliva do their work.(She also used to tell me a penny would turn green if I dropped it into a glass of Coke. I laughed then because I thought she was behind the times. Now I think she was brilliant.)

Absent back then,  Hostess products would have left a significant void in all of the sugary snacks available to Americans.

Not so now.

That's because high-fructose corn syrup laces most of the food products in those middle grocery aisles. If it's in a box or a can, it's probably got sugar, fat or salt; often, all three.

Back in the day when Twinkies premiered, most Americans were fairly fit. But as a society, we became more prosperous, we accumulated more stuff, and we began to eat a lot more food.

Food was no longer fuel for our bodies three times a day; smewhere along the way we became hooked, and food became a drug of choice.

Few people will go through withdrawal in the absence of Twinkies. There's still plenty of sugar out there.