Happy birthday, semi-phallic pastry and cream. The Twinkie was invented in Chicago, eighty years ago this past week. Chicago should take pride in The Twinkie, it’s one of a few frivolously good things to originate from the Windy City, including the ferris wheel and softball. But I don’t think either one of those things can brag that it’s been used by a defense attorney in court.

A brief history lesson of the convenience store staple that makes my stomach seize: Back in 1930, the Hostess bakery manager, James Dewar, created a cake with banana-cream filling after he realized that a few of the expensive machines used to make cream-filled strawberry shortcake weren’t being used for the months when strawberries were out of season. Dewar decided that his banana-cream concoction would make a suitable stand-in, and the Twinkie was born. Even though they only cost five cents a pop, the fact that the little cakes were made before the era of preservatives, their shelf life was only two days. Fast-forward to World War II. Bananas were on the list of rationed items, and Hostess decided that the best way to deal with the shortage was to pump the cake full of vanilla-cream. The switch was such a hit that they never went back to bananas.

And I hate to piss on anyone’s urban legend, but modern Twinkies only have a shelf life of twenty-five days, not forever. But perhaps we should marvel at the actual grotesquerie of a cream-filled cake that is devoid of any dairy products. Gross.

When I encountered all of this celebratory Twinkie trivia, it got me thinking, I wonder if there are any other morsels of minutiae out there about different snacks that are taken for granted in this country. Well, the amount of history that our candies and confections have is mind-boggling. I was pretty overwhelmed by the glut of information out there about the companies that currently manufacture, or have manufactured, many of the staples we see lining the counters of our pharmacies, delicatessens, and movie theaters. Nearly every munchie has a story. Now I present to you some of the more interesting tidbits that tickled my candy-hating fancy. (Seriously. Other than the occasional box of Raisinets or Junior Mints as a kid, candy just wasn’t my bag.)

Nabisco, like many of the snack food companies and bakeries in this country, can trace its roots back beyond the 1800s. The home-oven of the original lemon meringue Oreo, Nabisco dates its founding as having taken place in 1898, while the bakery business was going through some serious consolidation efforts. Back then the majority of the successful, smaller bakeries were being bought out by larger companies. For example, Interstate Bakery became a part of Hostess, as did Drake’s (of Drake’s Cakes.) More or less, the majority of sweets you eat come from a clusterfuck of mergers that happened before you were born. One of these was Josiah Bent Bakery, which was eventually gobbled up in the chain of mergers that became Nabisco.  In 1801, though, Josie Bent’s bakers, or one of them at least, decided to call a crunchy biscuit a "cracker." And thus the only sort-of derogatory epithet for white people was born. Only kidding, sort of. Epithets aren’t too far from Nabisco products now. I’m serious. 

In 1913, the same year as the Moon Pie, someone at Nabisco decided to take a bit of graham cracker, some marshmallow, and then cover the bitch with dark chocolate. This is known as a "Mallomar," a name that was the brain child of one very inebriated factory worker eating a peanut-butter sandwich. (I made that part up.) The problem with Mallomars is that they’re fickle. In the summer they melt, so they’re pretty much only available from October through April. Oddly enough, 70% of all Mallomars are sold in the New York metropolitan area. Okay, so, onto epithets. This combo of chocolate, marshmallow, and cookie is pretty badass, no? Moon Pies, s’mores, Pinwheels, there are probably other ones that I’m forgetting, but in this country alone, we rock this sweet trifecta pretty hard. And it’s not just us Yankees who find the gooey combination to be some seriously super sweets, a lot of different countries have their version of the Mallomar. Some countries have cutesy names for it, like Scotland’s "teacake," Canada’s "Whippets," and Austria’s interesting choice of Schwedenbomben, or "Swedish bombs." Other places? Not so enticing.

In the Netherlands these treats are called "Negerzoenen," which translates into "Negro kisses." Fortunately some companies have altered the name, opting for "Zoenen," or "kisses." In Germany, their "Negerkuss" was switched to "Schokoküsse," in Lebanon the sweets first hit the market as ras el abd, which translates to "slave’s head," it’s since been switched to Tarboush, which means "Fez." In Flanders they changed the truly icky name Negerinnentetten, or negress tits, to something less offensive. Maybe "Not Racist Tasties." Although it boggles the mind to think that these names fly in other parts of the world, I didn’t even get into the full list of as-yet-unchanged international racist Mallomars. (Not affiliated with the actual cookie name Mallomar, just the combination of ingredients.)

^{What about your dog food? It doesn’t go bad, does it? Not if it’s encased in foil it doesn’t. Back in the day, Post learned that wrapping dog food in foil kept it from spoiling. They figured this nifty trick could be really useful for human food, too. Enter "Country Squares," the original, Post-brand toaster pastry, which was announced to the press in 1963 before any of them were actually made for the market. Way to screw the pooch on that one, Post. Kellogg, Post’s biggest competitor, read the papers and decided that Country Squares seemed pretty cool. So cool, in fact, that they developed their own version in six months. Combine the cutthroat manufacturing with a really aggressive marketing campaign that involved an animated toaster and a name harkening to the fresh pop-culture phenomenon of Pop Art, and the Pop-Tart was born. The fuckers became so popular, Kellogg couldn’t keep up with the demand. Of course, back in ’64 none of them were frosted, and they were only available in strawberry, blueberry, brown sugar cinnamon, and the very sophisticated-sounding apple currant. The frosted version hit the market in 1967, after they proved that it wouldn’t ignite in the toaster. Or, uh, oops.}

In 1932, M&M/MARS introduced their third brand of candy to the world. Called "The 3 Musketeers Bar," it featured three pieces of candy in one package. Reminiscent of Neapolitan ice cream (which also has a long history) the bars were flavored chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. During World War II restrictions were placed on sugar, so the vanilla and strawberry segments were removed, leaving the most popular flavor of the three, chocolate. Back when it was introduced it only cost five cents, and it was marketed as one of the largest chocolate bars around. They also marketed it by saying you could share it with your friends, really, who’s generous enough to do that with their candy?

Mr. Goodbar, the grossest candybar ever to my younger, nut-hating self, was birthed from the cocoa-bowels of Hershey back in 1925. Recently the company began to replace some of the more pricey ingredients with cheaper ones, on that list was cocoa butter, which has now been replaced by oil substitutes. The motivation was to prevent having to raise the price for any product containing cocoa butter. Why is this weird and not just kind of sad? Because Mr. Goodbar had to have his package altered to say "made with chocolate and peanuts," instead of milk chocolate and peanuts. The ever-ridiculous, yet sometimes spot-on FDA has a law that states that recipes that don’t contain cocoa butter can’t technically be labeled milk chocolate. So Mr. Goodbar is no longer in a milky way. For the record, the Milky Way, which was the first filled chocolate bar back in 1923, was named for a milkshake, not the cosmos. And Milky Way Midnight used to be called Forever Yours, which seems appropriate for the ’70s. Now you know.

Kit Kats are different everywhere. The original version was British, only had two fingers, and hit the market on May 15, 1936. (Happy 74th birthday next month, Kit Kat.) Due to the fact that they come from across the pond, their distribution is wildly different than US candy. For one thing, a Kit Kat here is not like a Kit Kat anywhere, so don’t reach for one if you’re feeling homesick while gallivanting abroad. In the ‘Merican version of the four-fingered confection, we add more sugar and less milk in the chocolate coating. And that’s not the only difference. In Arabia there are only three fingers per pack, while Australia and France have twelve-finger options. In Japan, which has developed what I consider a sick obsession with the candy, they have a few sizes, including Kit Kat Petit, which is only half the size of a regular Kit Kat. That might not seem crazy to you, but some of the Kit Kat flavors available in Japan might: Apple Vinegar, Grilled Corn, Soy Sauce, Ginger Ale, and Maple Syrup, among others. Part of the reason why the Kit Kat is so uproariously popular over there has to do with the name. It sounds very much like the Japanese phrase kitto katsu, which loosely translates to "You will surely win!" It’s become a bit of a fad to give someone you like a Kit Kat before a test, or something equally challenging or important. Which leads me to wonder why I didn’t get a Kit Kat when I sat down to write a blog post about such an insanely detailed and well-recorded subject.

Other little details that I discovered include the fact that Doritos’ name is supposed to mean "little bits of gold" in Spanish, and they were the first tortilla chip on the national market; the package for the triangular German chocolate bar, Toblerone, has the image of a bear hidden in the Matterhorn, denoting the town of its origin; and Twix candy had a British advertising campaign with the slogan, "Twix without tea? It’s like horseriding without the horse! The Queen without her Corgis!"

Like I said, I hated candy growing up. So what did I like as a whippersnapper? Velveeta, Easy Cheese, anything that was neon orange and had the consistency of phlegm. An interesting fact about the Easy Cheese canister: it isn’t an aerosol can, but in fact uses nitrogen as its propellant. Industrial gas and cheese food. What a delicious combination.