Thursday, May 9, 2019

The Eternal Twinkie



Bangor Daily News [ME]
12 Aug 2004

Twinkie becomes teacher's legacy
30-year-old cake legendary among students at GSA

BLUE HILL - What's going to happen to the Twinkie? That's probably not the first question people asked when they heard that Roger Bennatti, a longtime science teacher at George Stevens Academy, would retire this year. […] "A kid brought in a package of Twinkies. I ate one immediately and put the other one up on top of the board. We were talking about the chemistry of food preservation; we wanted to see what the shelf life of a Twinkie was. The idea was to see how long it would take to go bad." The Twinkie stayed on top of the board for the rest of Bennatti's teaching career[.] […]


Bangor Daily News [ME]
20 June 2016

40 years later, Twinkie remains intact at Maine school

BLUE HILL, Maine — Twinkies and cockroaches. Those two things stand out among items that, short of blunt force trauma, are rumored to be invulnerable to the forces of decay and habitat destruction, according to popular folklore. An ongoing unscientific, four-decade experiment at George Stevens Academy is helping to feed that perception of the confection. […]



Harvey Pekar (script), Joseph Remnant (art), Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland (Scarsdale, NY: Zip Comics, 2012), 51.
 




Pekar, Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, 95. The first panel depicts John Zubal on the left, Pekar on the right.



The video clip at the following URL is from the eleventh episode of season three of “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations,” which aired on 27 August 2007. In it the host bravely samples decades-old “Twinkie sauce.” John Zubal remarks: “It’s interesting. When we had broken pipes here, the flies wouldn’t go after it, the rats and mice wouldn’t go near it.” He later notes that dogs like it, however.

Anthony Bourdain Visits Zubal Books

Laurie Lipton, “Bone China” (2009). The Drawings of Laurie Lipton (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2013). “Here is a picture of an elderly lady surrounded by chattering skeletons. Everything is decaying, except for the Twinkies & cupcakes on the table (which are made up of nonbiodegradable synthetic chemicals).”
 




Hector D. Cantu & Carlos Castellanos, Baldo, 28 February 2016.



The New Yorker, 22 February 2016.
 





KOMO-TV [Seattle, WA]
9 May 2019

Twinkies, Amazon stock among items to be sealed in 2062 Space Needle time capsule

[…] The Space Needle is conducting a nationwide search in a "quest to archive the moments and memorabilia that reflect the people and culture of today," Space Needle officials said. The capsule will be sealed away on Oct. 21 an opened on April 21, 2062. That quest kicked off Thursday when the first five items to be put into the time capsule were revealed. […] And finally, what would a time capsule from 2019 be without testing a food that is famously known to stand the test of time. Six Twinkies will join the other items in the capsule. […]

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