Mouthful

What in the world are you eating?

Real American industrial food

11 February 2009 | 1:06 - By Phil Lees

 Can you be nostalgic for industrial food?

twinkie_1973057974

The second last episode of Food Safari for 2009 managed to point out everything that is good about American food: the regionality, freshness and variability that comes from any gigantic and populous nation. In ticking off the American chow icons, it is remiss not to mention Twinkies, the sponge exemplar of American industrial food with almost forty ingredients squeezed into a "crème"-filled tube of chemical laden cake. As if to mock the entirety of American agriculture, five of those ingredients are mined rather than grown. One is petroleum based. Like most American fast foods, eight ingredients began their life as corn.

Their official shelf life stands at 25 days which is phenomenal for a cake but hardly meeting the urban legend that they're destined to be the official food source of the post-apocalyptic wasteland. You do tend to find them at convenience stores.

The Twinkie tastes something like a mock vanilla cream-filled bath toy. You could quite happily eat the small golden tube of cake without chewing; they're about the right size to slip straight down the most sensitive of gullets without engaging the gag reflex. Each year, Americans manage to down 500 million of the snack-sized cakes, the nation inhaling 1000 cakes every minute of the year.

Needless to say, Americans also deep fry them.

In a trend defying the global financial crisis, Interstate Bakeries Corporation, the current owner of the Twinkies, emerged from bankruptcy last week., which begs the question, what happens to iconic processed foods when the conglomerates that produce them disappear?

If you were committed enough, in the absence of a factory-made Twinkie you could probably produce a nigh on identical tubecake at home using six or seven ingredients rather than the requisite thirty nine. But it wouldn't be the same. They'd hardly be Proust's madeleine. You'd miss the peculiar chemical aftertaste and the ability to eat half, leave the remainder unattended for a month at room temperature, then eat the other half without the risk of death.Before the complete industrialization of food, if you were nostalgic for a long since tasted meal from childhood, you could whip yourself up a batch. With complex industrial food, recreating it at home is not feasible for most cooks.

There is the possibility of lobbying to bring back the industrial food in question. Thousands succeeded in reviving the Cadbury Wispa Bar in the UK by petitioning on Facebook - but this is not the norm. Industrial food gets lost in time.

So which dead food brands do you miss?

Share article: 
top

Comments (6)

17 Feb 2009 19:45 AEST

sonia

From: elwood

changed the recipe

i miss the way milo bars used to be, cram packed with real milo powder

Agree (3 people agree)    Disagree (0 people disagree) Report this
 

15 Feb 2009 20:19 AEST

Zoe

From: Canberra

Not really into comment titles, but it makes me

Vote three for Samboys. And even vegans miss twinkies

Agree (1 people agree)    Disagree (0 people disagree) Report this
 

15 Feb 2009 15:24 AEST

Russell

From: Southport Qld

It really gets you going!

I really miss the original Chokito bars of the 70's.

Agree (1 people agree)    Disagree (0 people disagree) Report this
 

12 Feb 2009 14:01 AEST

Dano

From: Holden Hill

Pizza Hut Submarine

Does any one remember Pizzaa Hut's submarine roll cut in half with chips in the middle? going back 15-20 years. that was the nicest cooked hot roll with potato chips aswell. it would be enough to fill a little any one up, not like meals nowdays hardly enough to statisfy even kids. bring back the submarine Pizza Hut!!!

Agree (1 people agree)    Disagree (2 people disagree) Report this
 

11 Feb 2009 20:23 AEST

Gav

From: Beverly Hills

Samboys

I am quite partial to Samboy's aswell. I reckon the 'You'll love Coles' brand BBQ chips are pretty similar

Agree (0 people agree)    Disagree (2 people disagree) Report this
 

11 Feb 2009 17:12 AEST

Belinda

From: Freshwater

Samboys

BBQ Samboy chips! Last time I was in QLD I spied them in the local supermarket and bought two massive bags to bring home with me. Alas they didn't last long and I haven't seen them in Sydney recently. Anyone know a secret source?

Agree (0 people agree)    Disagree (2 people disagree) Report this
 

Join the discussion

You have characters remaining.
Validation (
) :
This is a captcha-picture. It is used to prevent mass-access by robots.

PLEASE NOTE: All submitted comments become the property of SBS. We reserve the right to edit and/or amend submitted comments. HTML tags other than paragraph, line break, bold or italics will be removed from your comment.

About this Blog

A blog about what the world eats, when and where it eats it, and why it matters to us all. Only much less ambitious than that sounds and with more excruciating puns.

Phil Lees grew up in rural Victoria, the first generation in his family to not have lived on the farm and thereby not slaughter their own meat.

In 2005 he moved to Cambodia and started the nation’s first food blog, Phnomenon.com, named after the best pun that he has ever made. It turns out that Cambodian food is delicious and unlike the warnings in most guidebooks, is not likely to kill you with any immediacy. Gridskipper called him a “national treasure”. Lonely Planet’s Greater Mekong guide called him “the unofficial pimp of Cambodian cuisine”. The New York Times laughed at a funny hotdog he saw.

Phil makes a mean sausage, a hoppy pale ale, a modest laksa. He owns three barbecues and is in the market for a fourth.

 
ADVERTISEMENT

Other Blogs

TV
Food
Films
Documentary
World News Australia
Sport
About SBS
Business
Internet and Technology
Cycling Central
Festival Reports
Tour De France