The snack cake that wouldn’t die

Does any other foodstuff—or brand, for that matter—exert as weird a pull on the dark side of the consumer psyche as the Twinkie? Despite (or more likely because of) its seeming perfection—the golden fluffiness, the creamy filling—people simply want to take this snack cake down. For years, it’s been dogged by the rumor (baseless) that it has an essentially indefinite shelf life. (In some versions of the myth, it actually has a half-life, like nuclear waste.)