aging gracefully

Here’s What a 40-Year-Old Twinkie Looks Like

Once runaway climate change devastates Earth, it’ll be a planet full of cockroaches, rogue Big Macs, and uneaten Twinkies. There’s finally some proof to quiet all those Hostess snack-cake deniers out there:

It belongs to George Stevens Academy, a private school in Maine where it’s been chilling inside that glass case since 1976, the year Roger Bennatti gave his chemistry class a lesson on food additives and someone inquired about the presumed indestructibility of Twinkies. Curious himself, he dispatched a few students to the store to buy one, then parked it on the edge of his blackboard, where for three decades it sat, sat, and sat some more.

The cake outlasted Bennatti. After he retired in 2005, it was moved into the office of the dean of students, a woman named Libby Rosemeier who was a student in Bennatti’s 1976 class. While the item’s alarming amount of preservatives has done a bang-up job warding off mold and general decay, it’s kind of begun showing its age: “Because of its fame, it’s been sort of taken out and shown more in the past year than in the previous 30 years,” Bennatti explained back in 2005. “So it’s begun to sort of exfoliate a little bit. It’s starting to flake off just a tad.”

[ABC News]

Here’s What a 40-Year-Old Twinkie Looks Like