No, Twinkies Don’t Last Forever On the Shelf – IOTW Report

No, Twinkies Don’t Last Forever On the Shelf

NPR-

Last week, craving sweets, Colin Purrington remembered the Twinkies.

He’d purchased them back in 2012 for sentimental reasons when he heard that Hostess Brands was going bankrupt and Twinkies might disappear forever.

“When there’s no desserts in the house, you get desperate,” says Purrington, who went down to the basement and retrieved the old box of snack cakes, fully intending to enjoy several.

He busted out the Twinkies now, instead of waiting a couple more years, in part because he was “just so bored, with the pandemic,” Purrington says. “It’s terrible, but it just is mind-numbing after a while.”

Like many people, Purrington believed Twinkies are basically immortal, although the official shelf life is 45 days. He removed a Twinkie from the box, unwrapped it — it looked fine — and took a bite. Then he retched.

“It tasted like old sock,” Purrington says. “Not that I’ve ever eaten old sock.”

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He ended up sending them to a lab for study.

They noticed that the wrapping on the mummified Twinkie seemed to be sucked inward, suggesting that the fungus got in before the package was sealed and, while the fungus was consuming the Twinkie, it was using up more air or oxygen than it was putting out.

18 Comments on No, Twinkies Don’t Last Forever On the Shelf

  1. Uncle Al- fruit cakes aren’t immortal, AIDS does a pretty good job of taking care of that. Or were you referring to the brick of bourbon soaked dried fruits embedded in “cake” currently in use as a door stop in my office? Pretty sure those are everlasting.

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  2. Uncle Al
    OCTOBER 16, 2020 AT 9:18 PM

    “OK. Twinkies are not immortal, but what about fruit cake?”

    …I think there’s only about six of those in the whole world, baked fresh for the first Christmas to celebrate the actual birth of Jesus in 1 AD, but they’ve just been passed around so much since then that every single person on Earth has received one of them at one time or another…

    …under no circumstances are you to eat them, they are ONLY for display, and eating one NOW would be like using the Shroud of Turin for a pillowcase, and be just about as bad for your spiritual and physical health, too…

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  3. Isn’t candy corn immortal??

    I believe they were originally made in 1872 and never made since.

    The original batch was so large and the demand so small…..they are still available today.

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  4. no, no, no …. y’all thinkin’ ’bout Peeps … just dig ’em out of last years Easter basket, throw ’em in a bowl of water for a couple of minutes, stick ’em on a window sill for a day & …..

    voila! fluffy, fluffy sugar-bomb!

    now … let’s move on to McDonald’s french fries

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  5. We have a fruit cake that was made by my Grand Dad on the day JFK was shot Uncle Al, we tried a bite about 15 years ago and it still tasted like fruit cake. It is still in the freezer.
    I hate fruit cake, but that one is hard to let go of, people can not believe it when we pull it out with the date on it almost 60 years old.

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