Healthy Junk Food and the death of Twinkies

Everyone by this point has heard of Hostess declaring bankruptcy, and the probable end of Twinkies and other junk food items. There's also apparently a trend to try and make junk food seem healthier than it is, such as Pepsi's fat-blocking soda (only available in Japan). Does junk food have a future by becoming healthier? The trend has already been showing up in fast food chains, such as adding apple slices and milk as options for kid's meals.

Any other thoughts or comments on the future of healthy junk food, or will it forever be an oxymoron?

I hadn't. And I don't know what "Hostess" is, though I can sort of guess it from context. Please add a line or two about this in the OP for us non-Americans.

Hostess is a huge snack and bakery company in America. Very recently (As in this happened like yesterday as of this posting) there was an employee strike because of cuts to paychecks and benefits while the CE Os gave themselves raises. Instead of dealing with the strike they decided to just shut down all Hostess bakeries and will soon be selling off all intellectual assets like Twinkies recipes.

Not like others can't figure out that recipe for themselves, though. I saw a whole list of them last night!

But anyway, I really doubt that Hostess closing is going to encourage healthier snack food. Also, that article indicates that drink probably isn't healthy and might in fact be worse than regular Pepsi due to dextrin in large amounts being bad for us. I don't think "junk food" is going to get healthier, really. Snack food probably will, but junk food is still junk.

To be fair, healthy junk food is an oxymoron term anyway and any junk food that is healthy is pretty much snacks. Or at least according to my definition of the term.

edited 19th Nov '12 5:27:07 PM by IraTheSquire

And Hostess may not go under either.

Would fruit snacks (snacks made from processed fruits, not snacks that are mostly whole fruits) be more healthy than corn chips or something? Or would they still be too heavy on sugar and whatnot?

It's processed in any way it's going to be inferior to real fruit. They put sugars and preservatives in those things. Now, I'm not going to stop anyone from eating those. I enjoy them myself, quite often in great quantity. But I'm not going to make the mistake of thinking they're healthier than corn chips or anything.

That said, I've read that the less ingredients a thing has, the more real food is in it. So now I read labels and check how many ingredients are in things.

-opens a bottle with label: Ingredient: Na OH-

I think it's better to actually learn what is in the stuff rather than taking the shortcuts though.

I think the idea is that the shorter the list the less likely there's some sort of chemical like coloring and the like is in it. You know, unnecessary junk. That's how it's been when I've checked the labels.

edited 19th Nov '12 6:31:34 PM by AceofSpades

@Best: My apologies, I've seen enough memes about the death of Twinkies I figured it was well publicized enough. Hostess is the company that makes Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and similar junk food items, as well as Wonder bread. They've been bleeding money for the last decade or so, and are currently somewhere around $850 million in debt, despite a previous bankruptcy in 2004.

Processed fruit: Are you talking about the stuff like fruit-flavored gummy candies, or fruit roll-ups? As was stated, any kind of industrial processing tends to add quite a bit of sugar or corn syrup, as well as numerous preservatives. My mom used to make homemade fruit roll-ups, which are of course healthier than the store-bought alternative, but still rather heavy on the sugars. Dried fruit is fairly nutricious, but it's also more expensive than fresh.

Hostess makes junk food. They're also famous for really cheesy product placement. Here's a parody that's hilariously close to the original.

Blue, not all of us come from the States. To a lot of us, Twinkies are "something that happens in movies".

Just as you'd have no idea what a Peppermint Crisp is. Or Wagon Wheels, a Tunnock's Tea Cake or Branches (Swiss chocolate bar, made by Cailler-Nestlé).

edited 19th Nov '12 8:12:02 PM by Euodiachloris

Nonsense, everyone knows American products! And no, but I do know what Tim Tams are, and they are delicious and about as nutricious as Twinkies.

They're also awesome.

Jaffa Cakes are pretty good too.

We do get Branches here. Swiss chocolate brands are all over the place.

I have to buy Branches off teh interwebs. <twitches> Damn you, Cailler-Nestlé! Why did you make me addicted to those and Rayon! Nothing good ever comes out of Broc!

Even if you are from the States, it's not like we come across them regularly. I know of them more from Popcultural Osmosis than actually buying or eating them.

I see more people wearing Twinkies gear like pajama pants and keychains then actually eating the treats myself.

But yeah, health of product has nothing to do with it. It's just another example of corporate greed and deregulation gone wrong.

But yeah, health of product has nothing to do with it. It's just another example of corporate greed and deregulation gone wrong.

Except that it's not.

The snack market has been over-saturated for years now, there are more providers than sales really support. A lot of that competition for Hostess also have manufacturing facilities that are far more modern than Hostess, whose plants are mostly operating on decades-old equipment that's not exactly the model of efficiency. Add to that union rules that unnecessarily multiplied labor costs (bread delivery people couldn't, for example, handle the snacks, and vice-versa, so Hostess was paying for two people to deliver to each store; unlike many snack companies the local distribution^note not by the Teamsters, by the way, who only handled moving product from the factory to the distribution centers, and were willing to work with Hostess over labor contract arrangements to try to keep the company running wasn't handled by franchisees but direct employees of Hostess), poor decisions by executives following the 2004 bankruptcy, and the push for more healthy snacks, and the question isn't really "what's responsible?" as much as it is "what took it so long?".

As an unrelated aside, when I was at work earlier today (yes, you read that right) at the supermarket providing my current income, I had a customer come up and ask me where the Twinkies are. I told him where they were, but also let him know that they sold out the day the news announcement of the company's going under hit the airwaves.

edited 22nd Nov '12 8:21:26 PM by Nohbody

Hostess cut employee pay and benefits, and gave the CE Os raises in the millions of dollars. How is that not mismanagement? There's nothing in the unions that forced them to do that.

Instead of giving themselves ridiculous amounts of raises they could have kept paying their employees the same wage and investing more money in advertising.

I've eaten exactly one Twinkie in my life. It was disgusting. I for one am glad Hostess might be going under. There are plenty of things that taste good and are healthy to snack on and I'd love to see them become more readily available.

Ace of Spades is right. If they have the money to give the CEO's giant salaries, they had the money to modernize their factories, pay fair wages, or whatever. Plus I'm willing to bet that if they actually were improving their working conditions, the unions would have been more willing to compromise and work with them.

I personally don't eat their stuff, don't allow my kid to eat it, so hopefully we can try and use this as a cross opportunity to improve our diets as well as economic systems.

Even if hostess goes under, you guys realize that their ingrediants would be sold to someone like Kraft, right?

Also, junk food will stay around as long as they are A) Easy to munch on B) Taste good.

Not really, let's say the company executives received $5 million, I found something with that level of numbers. If you've got 100 employees, sure you can afford it, but if you have 20,000 or so like Hostess did, that's only $250 per employee. For a 40 hour week, for 50 weeks, that's a raise of only 12.5 cents an hour. People on minimum wage would probably appreciate it but that has to be weighed against what the proposed cuts to wages and pensions were. Plus you added modernizing the factories- not sure what they would need but I'm betting we're looking at a couple of million to tens of millions for that.

Also, this pay raise happened around when they were going for bankruptcy? OK, well, then you know, they probably weren't doing what the company could afford, they were trying to get their raises in before they lost the opportunity. Bad (and the creditors have something to say about it[1]) but not for the reasons you have.

Plus the planned executive pay increases apparently didn't go ahead [2], [3].

edited 23rd Nov '12 3:50:49 AM by SomeSortOfTroper

I think the world would implode if Mc Donald's were to go under.