Bye bye Hostess

Once again the victim of vulture capitalism the bakery outlet that provided such items as Wonder Bread that built bodies 12 ways whatever that meant. Nothing like extracting all the nutritional value out of a food produce then putting a bit of it back and touting how good it is for you. That's the American way. Sell em cheap manure in pretty packaging with a high profit margin and the CEO and stockholders dance in the streets when the dividend checks come their way. To its' somewhat defense I'm sure the original product was quite good when first introduced some years back. Who wouldn't be a sucker for banana cream filling? But that was not to last even though the price of bananas is still pretty cheap. And let me rat out the rats who switched vanilla flavors for that artificial stuff. I'll tell you about vanillin that tasty substitute.  You could just about fabricate a steel belted radial with the chemicals used to produce it. Who in their right mind thought that was a safe alternative should be made to take a bath in it on a regular basis. Had to wear a plastic moon suit when we decommissioned a factory that produced it here. Mmmm, might be finger lickin good if you had any fingers left.

But all of this seems to be the way our food stuffs are going. What was once a fine and proud product gradually turns into something close to the brunt of a Leno joke. Sugar gets replaced with corn syrup. Butter gets replaced with lard or worse some out of the country plant extract and soon the end result is more like a tinker toy than something you'd want to eat. It's cheating I tell you. And nothing hurts more than the images that are professed. Products come no where near the taste of grandma's kitchen when the ingredients were fabricated in a laboratory and produced by automated stainless steel fingers in the industrial district.

What of the workers? They just wanted a taste of the profits and a hope that maybe they could save a buck or two to be able to send their kids to college and have a decent retirement. Were they really bakers? Not when your job was to dump 100 lb. bags of ingredients into massive mixing bowls for eight hours a day. Where's the love and pride in that? It all made the process little more than a factory cranking out product by the hundred thousands. I'd bet for them grandma's recipe has long been forgotten and they wouldn't know a whisk from a nut grader. Sad situation indeed.

It seems we've come full circle with our culinary delights. What was once a real treat at just the right size, price and quality has become merely a way of adding to the bottom line. First it was bigger is better and the race to produce the biggest to the point of ridiculous and now it's an ongoing battle to shave the product to it's minimal ends and squeeze the last nickel for the balance sheet. I'd make my own if it wasn't for the fact that grandma never wrote anything down. She kept everything in her head and took it all to the grave with her.

Maybe it's all for the best. After all the products are nothing like their original producers intended and maybe just maybe somebody will come up with something better as long as they focus on the product and not the bottom line.