I’m sorry all those people lost their jobs, but honestly, I don’t mourn the demise of the Twinkie, and all other Hostess products. They are, or were, the very definition of crap. When I was a teenager working in our small-town supermarket, I would usually buy a Hostess product to eat on my break. The thing I recall about all of them was that the cake was really dry, and the “creme” (sic) filling tasted like chemicals. The best thing on the shelf was the orange creme-filled cupcakes, because the frosting was so delicious it made up for the awfulness of the rest of it. Besides, for whatever reason, the orange cake was moister than the bone-dry cake in the other Hostess products.

I don’t mind at all eating high-fat junk food, as long as it tastes decent. I love a Moon Pie, which is about as junky as you can get, but which is also delicious. Sometimes, a bag of Zapp’s potato chips hits the spot like nothing else — but I’d rather go hungry than eat mealy-mouthed Lay’s.

I was surprised to discover in reading the Twinkie obits that Hostess also manufactured (I won’t say “baked”) Dolly Madison brand snack products. This made me recall how advertising colonized my impressionable young nerd mind back in the 1970s. Gen X readers may recall that Dolly Madison (“Neat to eat treats”) sponsored all the Charlie Brown network specials, and that the Peanuts gang were Dolly Madison spokesmen. ‘Memba this?:

As a kid, I used to watch those commercials during the Charlie Brown specials, and pine for Dolly Madison snack products. The fact that we couldn’t get them in our town was, to me, another sign that we lived in BF, Egypt. We didn’t have a McDonalds, and we didn’t have Dolly Madison snack products. We were nobodies! And then one day, miracle of miracles, Dolly Madison products showed up on the snack cake shelf at the IGA. I chose based on the Charlie Brown character featured most prominently on the wrapper; I don’t remember the flavor, but I do remember I wanted the one associated with Linus, my favorite Charlie Brown character. How shocked I was to discover that the fried pie inside tasted exactly like the Hostess fried pies I wouldn’t eat because they didn’t taste very good.

The making of a cynic, right there in the snack food aisle! Oh, the humanity.