I don’t want to eat a Twinkie, but like most of our generation of 1970s and 1980s kids I did privately mourn their absence from grocery stores during the Great Twinkie Blight of 2011-15 (after the original Hostess Company went bankrupt and before production was resumed under a reconstructed Hostess, Inc., that trades today on the Nasdaq under the symbol TWNK). In theory, my brothers and I weren’t allowed to eat shelf-stable “treats” like Hostess CupCakes or Drake’s Yankee Doodles; we were a carob-bar and bowl-of-fruit sort of household. But when I was in middle school, the authorities let us, the monkeys, leave the zoo at lunchtime to wander unchaperoned down Newtown Lane to Eddie’s Luncheonette or Brothers Four for our midday meal, and I took that opportunity to carry my dollar bill a few steps further down the block to Dreesen’s Excelsior Market, where I bought a naughty sugar bomb instead.
Some executive in a Kansas City high rise — some midcentury Mad Man swiveling in his Herman Miller desk chair in a natty narrow tie — must have had a few too many whiskey sours while dreaming up the very silly and yet very irresistible names of the horrible snacks of the 1970s: Ring-Dings, Ding-Dongs, Devil Dogs, Ho-Hos. . . . I never did like Sno-Balls — beautifully pink marshmallow cushions sprinkled with shaved coconut — although I did like to touch their pillowy perfection. My favorite Drake’s cake was the Yodel. Yodels were — are — mini Swiss rolls of chocolate sponge filled with white “creme” that tasted like petroleum jelly. Do you remember Funny Bones, the torpedo-shape, peanut-butter-filled chocolate mini cake from Drake’s? There was the plain, squishy, vanilla-cream-filled Twinkie and then there was the Funny Bone, the Twinkie’s kooky beatnik cousin.
The only kinds of snacks I ever really crave, these days, are midnight snacks of the savory variety: a nice, stinky, fatty French Morbier cheese on water crackers, or a bowl of well-buttered popcorn. Before bed? Why not, I say. I’m not Saint Augustine. But while I don’t really understand why any adult would be tempted to eat barbecue-flavored Lays in the middle of a random afternoon, I am nevertheless nostalgic for the concept of all-American supermarket snacks as we knew them in my childhood. I miss that cheerful and cartoon-colored world of highly processed delight.
It goes without saying that none of these treats — toaster muffins, Doodles, Nutter Butters — were particularly tasty, but there was great joie de vivre in their selection and consumption. How cheerful you were as you looked up at supermarket shelves stacked so neatly and geometrically with ghastly 1970s breakfast cereals. I dearly wanted my parents to buy us a box of Quisp cereal; I was equally intrigued and confused by the mystery of the Quisp packaging, which featured a pink, overjoyed outer-space alien with a pinwheel growing from the top of his head. (Why an alien? Why pink? Did it hurt if someone spun his pinwheel?) No one ever let me eat Kaboom, either; that one was a corn cereal extruded in smiley-face shapes and accented by marshmallow stars. Kaboom had a crazed-looking circus clown on the box.
The world of 1970s snackitude was fully encompassing, a total sensory experience of taste, texture, aroma, sound, and vision. Picture a child of 6 or 7 lolling on a shag carpet, eating Boo Berry cereal — a blueberry-marshmallow combination whose mascot was a blue ghost — while watching “Magilla Gorilla” on the Saturday morning cartoons and tapping his or her spoon in time to the advertisements for brightly colored foods composed of ingredients created in the American laboratories that sent astronauts to the moon. There was the Cocoa Puffs cuckoo bird, the Trix rabbit, Count Chocula, Toucan Sam, the dopey pink Franken Berry monster with bolts on either side of his head, and that weirdo Cap’n Crunch, a deranged sea captain with bulging eyes who slurred his words and clearly had been dipping into the rum.
If you are my age, the words “Fruity Pebbles” conjure a certain smell, and you can still chant the lyrics to the Dr. Pepper and Oscar Mayer jingles. I remember a classmate at the Hampton Day School who went mad during a class trip to New York City, crept up to a pair of strangers who were billing and cooing on a bench in Central Park, and startled the hell out of them by suddenly scream-singing the Fritos Corn Chips jingle to the tune of “Cielito Lindo (Canta y no Llores)”: “Ai-yai-yai-yai,” he shrieked, “I am a Frito bandito!” Oh, how we laughed.
It was probably wrong for food manufacturers to exploit the imaginations of children by marketing such unwholesome snacks so giddily and so irresistibly, but we survived. When I was a student at boarding school in Massachusetts, a couple years after I’d given up Yodels, I had a clever and unconventional friend named Joe McFarland who trudged around campus in a long black trench coat like Ian Curtis of Joy Division, and who in 1983 or 1984 coined a word that pops into my brain each and every time I open a bag of chips: The word was “snackmosphere.” Snackmosphere was the aromatic puff of air released from the chip bag as you ripped it open. Like helium gas. Snackmosphere was the very atmosphere in which Gen X grew up.
The most disturbing factoid I ever heard about Barack Obama was that when he was president and felt peckish between meals — burning the midnight oil in the Oval Office, penning a fiery address to the Democratic National Convention — he would allow himself a penurious handful of lightly salted almonds. The New York Times sent out a news alert on social media recording the precise number of almonds the president, our Saint Augustine of the Potomac, permitted himself: not six almonds, not eight almonds, but seven almonds.
Thanks, Obama!
Way to make ordinary Americans feel like hogs.
Of course, if you actually read the Times article that spawned the news alert, it was revealed that the seven-almonds thing had been only a joke. Michelle liked to rib her husband about how disciplined he could be in all things. But, even so, the commander in chief did make most of us look rawther greedy by comparison. Subsequent news reports revealed that when he really went to town — really cut loose and let himself snack with abandon — Barack’s sin of choice was guacamole and tortilla chips.
Guacamole? You devil, you.