Junk food always will exist, regardless of our attempts to educate and perhaps even regulate taste/consumption: “critical theory lets you think and act at the same time… while knowing the limits of your action”
“The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production, but the productive forces within bourgeois society create the material conditions for a solution. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.” (Alex Semjenow @alexsmjnw)
Nostalgia is one of many ‘value-forms’ that saved or resurrected the Twinkie. Never mind the imitations done by bakeries other than Hostess and the history of its corporate ownership changes. it has a place in memories and unfortunately consciousness that manufacture a trivial, yet signifying commodity because marketing and consumer culture is not limited to baked goods.
It is about branding and perhaps rebranding the limits of consumer culture. The Twinkie signifies the gap between compensation and productivity, where the junk or rubbish represented by snack food renders the need for veganism even more vital. Twinkies has come back to the stock market, where conceptually it should never have been. Twinkies are a depression food, or at very least a recession food.
A press release by the American Association for the Advancement of Science describes a new study sharing that, during the Great Recession, "adults overall ate more refined grains and solid fats and children increased their intake of added sugar." People also ate fewer healthy proteins and green vegetables.
Ultimately the 21st Century, somewhat like the 19th Century is about the Entrepôt. or warehouse in global trade and a warehouse-friendly Twinkie can be sold and distributed more like a candy bar. Truckstop sushi is not quite there yet. "We now ship to all Wal-Marts, dollar stores, 100,000 convenience stores, plus vending machines and food services," says Andy Jhawar.
The Twinkie is also about valorization “The Twinkie was born in 1930 from Depression-era efficiency: James Dewar, an employee at a Chicago-area plant, needed something to do with unused strawberry shortcake pans when the fruit was out of season.” American pragmatism at its finest.
How they'd do it? Cherry--picking top assets, modernizing manufacturing and distribution, doubling the shelf life of products and capitalizing on the rare place in pop culture Hostess products still held.
More importantly, bankruptcy and deunionizing moved the company into a better position as a capitalist property acquisition. It may be an example of neoliberal devolution in that its recovering a market position came from the leanness and meanness that came from ‘junk food” legal defenses that make a mythology of right-wing hatred of the “Other”. Private equity enables the predation in the food business that seeks new platforms to scoop up classic brands and re-brands the associated cultural nostalgia, aided by a anti-modern, post-diet program sensibility in the marketing.
In 2012 its equity value was wiped out in a Chapter7/11 bankruptcy, the debt--holding hedge funds weren't interested in any such hand-wringing. They just wanted their money back, the debt--holders shuttered it, engendering those "end of an era" editorials nationwide.
The Twinkie Story Demonstrates the Devolution of U.S. Business
Once upon a time, more than 160 years ago, a man surnamed Ward started a bakery in New York City. In 1925, his grandson gave part of the family business a grand name, a name that illustrated the unbridled optimism of the roaring 20s: Continental Banking Co. The same year, he bought what was then the largest bakery in the country, the maker of Wonder Bread.
Oh, and on April 3, 1926 (pdf) the Department of Justice forced the parent company, Ward Food Products Corporation, to be broken up into three “independent corporations”: Continental Baking, General Baking and Ward Baking Co.
In 1930, the manager of Continental’s Hostess Bakery in Chicago invented the Twinkie. The Great Depression was underway, and “we needed a good two-pack nickel number,” James A. Dewar said in a 1980 interview.
themoderatevoice.com/...
Behind the financial maneuvering at Hostess, an investigation by The New York Times found a blueprint for how private equity executives like those at Apollo have amassed some of the greatest fortunes of the modern era.
Deals like Hostess have helped make the men running the six largest publicly traded private equity firms collectively the highest-earning executives of any major American industry, according to a joint study that The Times conducted with Equilar, a board and executive data provider. The study covered thousands of publicly traded companies; privately held corporations do not report such data.
[...]
The Times investigation of the Hostess deal shows that today’s private equity also uses another set of tactics, like special dividends and tax arrangements, that maximize profits in creative, yet financially risky ways.
www.nytimes.com/…
If only we’d have the creative destruction of an apocalypse, or at least imagine one. And what signifies the survival of such events, cockroaches and Twinkies. Zombieland is a Guns & Butter economy.
2012
Since the new Hostess just had the cakes, not the bread, it could rethink everything. A switch to a centralized--warehouse model would both save money and get Hostess products into more shops. The problem: Twinkies--with a reputation as the cockroach of the food kingdom, able to survive flood, famine and nuclear war--had a shelf life of only about 25 days. And since the warehouse model meant food might have to sit in storage as long as two weeks, even Twinkies risked going stale.
2013
Marketing teams flooded college campuses, throwing parties with Twinkies and Pabst beer, creating a ton of viral content for social networks. And Hostess' brief earlier demise was the best marketing tool of all. Says Dean Metropoulos: "My suspicion is that if Hostess hadn't gone out of business, if we had just taken it over while it was still running, we wouldn't have gotten this reception."
www.forbes.com/...
A decade later, they’re back onto the Stock Market, with the Apocalypse still closer but also far away from capitalist bankruptcy. Yet junk bonds and junk food maintain a family resemblance for capitalist appetites.
Zombieland is a flick that boasts the greatest cameo in the history of cinema (Bill Murray, who else?), a great cast of characters, one of the best openings to a film and one of the worst TV spin offs ever conceived. I mean, whose idea was it to have the same characters recast with nobody actors? Madness. The film itself also boasts a huge advertisement for the Twinkie. Tallahassee is a mad survivor in the midst of a zombie apocalypse with one drive; finding the remaining Twinkie before it goes out of date, A concept that is slightly wasted on most audiences outside of America. After many false starts he finally finds his holy grail towards the end of the film when discovers the last box which he accidentally shoots. Unfortunately, it only contains mushed up Twinkies. His unlikely partner states that 'words cannot express...' before Talhassee cuts in to tell him 'it's too soon.' By the end of the film though, Tallahassee has his Twinkie via another part of his crew who throws it to him right before they ride off into the night. The Twinkie is a great red herring for the film and an incredible example of product placement actually working. Except it didn't work at all. The ridiculous part of this story is the fact that, in real life, Twinkies' parent company 'Hostess' filed for bankruptcy which resulted in the production of Twinkies being suspended for the foreseeable future. The word 'Suspended' provides some hope to the Twinkieless world we live in, but somewhere in Zombieland, Tallahassee has a gun in pointed to his head in complete purgatory.
whatculture.com/...
It’s been a busy week so I’ll be back to ecosocialism next month. Maybe I’ll try to make a twinkie from scratch.