Now some of you will be appalled by what I'm about to write, what with the state of the world and global hunger etc. I'm not usually what you would call a decadent man, I would actually say I'm a man of simple tastes. However, after watching Zombieland for the second time, I just spent £16 ordering a box of 10 Hostess Twinkies to be shipped to my house.I know Twinkies are just a very light sponge tube, filled with a very artificial tasting cream, not necessarily the best food for a recovering heart patient! However, I felt such an overwhelming craving (coupled with the fact that I am kind of tied to my laptop, with little else to do), that I found myself buying them.
Now I understand that Twinkies are junk food, and that over in the US they probably cost about $1 for 10 and that I just paid about $20 for 10, but this craving runs deeper than the last time I watched Zombieland.
As a child growing up, I devoured DC and Marvel comics. I was obsessed with them. Not just the stories within them, but the advertisements too. Advertisements for Sea-Monkeys, Charles Atlas work out system, X-Ray Spex, 1000 plastic soldiers for $1 and so on. But also the food advertisements, aimed at children... stuff we could not get in the UK... Lucky Charms, Hershey Bars, Grape Soda, Wonderbread and of course... Twinkies.
These were the best advertisements of all, actually one page stories featuring the very superheroes whose comics they were advertised in. (Although th only one I can remember clearly featured Aquaman, a superhero with whom I'm not particularly familiar to this day).
Now, it is possible to get a lot more varieties of US food in the UK than it was 30 years ago, but very often the prices are ridiculously over-priced (e.g. Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese in Asda £1, Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese in Selfridges £5!) Still, if you want the Twinkie sugar rush, you gotta pay 'top dollar'!
I'll let you know whether it was worth the price I paid when I taste them!
13 comments:
oh how that took me me back, adverts trying to recruit paper boys and the gifts on offer you could save up for if you delivered the paper
You could get Lucky Charms for a while in the uk.
But for some reason they just stopped doing them.
Could be due to a number of reason.
The best one I heard was that some stupid kid choked on a rubber because he mistaken it for the marshmallows.
Oh those wonderful and beautiful marshmallows.
Sounds good Father K. Any chance you could get me a Marathon?
Spot on BJ, for some reason the magazine you could sell (or the company that produced it) was called "Grit". They showed pictures of bikes, remote controlled cars, skateboards and so on, that I bet you would have had to sold gazillions of the crappy magazine to have 'earned'.
Spot on again Koobs. Lucky Charms (and marshmallow in cereal in general) just never caught on here. Kellogs once tried to put Marshmallow shapes in Ricicles, but that was just wrong! However, our fear of marshmallow meant that we never experienced the joy of Count Chocula or Frankenberry cereals in our native land, or indeed Fruit Loops, which I think were just too colourful for the UK pallet...
A Marathon you say dear Sonnyboy? Would you like some Opal Fruits to go along with that? LOL!
Hope you enjoy the Twinkies! The Twinkie was invented in the great city of Chicago, the house of the inventor was a short train ride from my apartment. In fact, a room in his house has walls painted a very Twinkie yellow. Inspiration perhaps?
In fact, the original Twinkie had a banana creme filling. It wasn't until WWII that the vanilla flavor took its place due to a shortage of bananas. After the war, the vanilla flavor stuck, but recently a Banana flavor has been introduced (as seen in your photo). The more you know!
Now I want banana flavoured ones!
And what about those cheese crackers with the peanut butter in the middle?
And Mountain Dew!
And A&W Rootbeer!
And Sour cream crisps!
AAARRRGGGHHH! I'm having a US food attack!
and the mini hovercraft which i always hoped was one you could sit on and ride, now im older i know it wasnt, oh the innocence of youth
Twinkies are not worth that much money.
I did buy some Tim-Tams because they generally are only available in Australia. But they were on sale.
Frankenberry!
Holy crap I ALWAYS look for this cereal and I only find it like ONCE every 5 years.
It's like the BEST SUGAR CEREAL EVER.
This is made so much more precious because of it's scarcity.
It's been a year since I last saw a box in store.
Now that it's Halloween there is actually a good chance a store around here must have it stocked.
There are very few "american" foods that I endorse.
Avocado is the VERY BEST american food.
I think that we have some really kick ass diet/regular root beers that nobody else has. (IBC, Saranac, ect.)
Colby Jack Cheese is good.
We have some really awesome brands of meatless hamburgers / garden burgers made with mushrooms and stuff.
Do other countries have Cheese Curd? Cheese curd kicks ass.
I know that my hometown was well known for Croghan Baloney which is actually more like sausage than anything else. (It's basically what you get when you use really good cuts of meat to make sausage.)
Also, Zombieland was a very good movie.
Cheese curds and jerky rule! I also enjoy venison. I had Frankenberry last week, Count Chocula this week.
Oh, and I second avacados.
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