The Twinkie: an indestructible icon of American capitalism | Mike Daisey | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The Twinkie: an indestructible icon of American capitalism | Mike Daisey | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk:

Friday, Hostess, the seminal American bakery, announced it was declaring a final bankruptcy. It ceased production immediately, and as its halls went silent across the nation, you could hear Americans realizing this was the end of the Hostess Fruit Pie, which has nothing resembling fruit in it, and is only a pie if you have a drunken and scandalous definition of "pie".

So, too, would pass the Devil Dogs, the Ding Dongs, the Funny Bones, and most mysteriously something called "Chocodiles", which I could Google to determine what it actually is, but I am happiest believing is a chocolate-cakey crocodile filled with a slightly sweet frosting made from Elmer's glue, soap, and human tears.

But nothing aroused our pathos like the loss of the Twinkie.

All day long, the scribes of the internet, chained to their iPads with absurdly expensive keyboards, sat in coffee shops in fashionable neighborhoods and thought about what this meant. Hostess gone? This icon, this emblem … you could hear the great wheel spinning and spinning.

And maybe, this was a magical moment in a sense – few times in our history have we yet seen the triumph of branding so complete. Because despite this outrage and despair, beneath the nostalgia and sadness, there are no actual humans who like Twinkies.

Let us be clear, there are millions who respond to the word. Twinkie. And we have its brand associations buried deep in our hippocampus, thrumming and pulsing up against our midbrain. We remember that scene in Ghostbusters when the hypothetical giant Twinkie of ectoplasm would engulf the city, we remember eating them in our youth and in our shameful moments …

But what is interesting is that no one actually likes them.