Goodbye to My Twinkie Days WHEN I heard this week that the Hostess cake company was going out of business, I decided to pay my respects: I went out and bought a 10-pack box of Twinkies. Though the more immediate cause of the company's trouble is a labor dispute with members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, its demise has been a long time coming. After all, we're not supposed to eat like this anymore. The hydrogenated oils, artificial flavors, high fructose corn syrup - Michael Pollan would not approve. Mr. Pollan, I swear that I have not tasted a Twinkie in years. I would not feed them to my kids. But I can't stop the nostalgia, rising even now in the recitation of names: Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Sno Balls, Zingers, Donettes, Suzy Q's. Generations of us carried these Hostess treats in our lunchboxes, traded them, saved bites of frosting and cream for last. Soon, unless another company buys the brands, they'll be nothing but liquidated assets. "Junk food" is a phrase at once grotesque and appealing. We know it's bad, and that's why we want it. The Twinkie, introduced in 1930, was a best-selling treat of the Depression and is still one of the company's top items. The inventor got the idea after seeing baking equipment for strawberry cakes go unused when the fruit was out of season. It seems incredible now that mass-production of food once shifted with the seasons. We have Hostess largely to thank for the very concept of the "snack cake," lifting sweets from dessert time to anytime. Of the company's many products - the chocolate CupCakes with the white squiggle across the top, Fruit Pies, Dolly Madison cakes, even Wonder Bread - the Twinkie, fresh from the package or deep-fried at a county fair, has been its most enduring icon. For me, a child of Vietnamese immigrants growing up in Michigan in the 1980s, Twinkies were a ticket to assimilation: the golden cake, more golden than the hair I wished I had, filled with sweet white cream. Back then, junk foods seemed to represent an ideal of American indulgence. They've since become a joke, a stereotype of shallow suburbia. For Asian-Americans, to be a twinkie is to be a sellout: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Even the name "Hostess" seems quaintly outdated, like "stewardess" or "butler." On the box of Twinkies I bought there's a cartoon of a Twinkie as a cowboy; his sidekick is a short, swarthy chocolate cupcake. Whether Hostess meant to evoke the Lone Ranger and Tonto or was simply trying to recapture a glory-days notion of sweet-toothed kids playing dress-up, the company seems determined to be retro. Yet maybe that's exactly why the Twinkie has continued to fascinate: it is already a relic. When I opened one, the smell of sugary, fake, buttery-ish vanilla took me back to my elementary school and the basketball lines on the floor of the gym that doubled as our lunchroom. The underside of the cake had the same three white dots where the cream filling had been punched in, and it tasted like what it was, a blend of shortening and corn syrup, coating the tongue. I didn't think the Twinkie would thrill the way it used to, and it didn't. But it tasted like memory. We might bake our own cakes now, eat whole grain bread, and try to follow those grocery store Food Rules, but who among us can forget being sugar-shocked by processed goods? What will it mean if Twinkies and Zingers become footnotes, gone the way of Uneeda Biscuit and Magic Middles? There's nothing like junk foods, emblems of our shared pop culture, to create a conversation and establish common ground. Losing the Twinkie will mean losing a connection to our shared past; it will be another part of the long goodbye to our youth. As Hostess goes under, we become older. According to popular myth, Twinkies are so stuffed with chemicals and preservatives that they will last for decades. Hostess insists that the shelf life is more like 25 days. I decided to store the rest of mine in the cupboard above my refrigerator, out of reach but available, just in case. I may never eat them, but I like knowing that they exist, that I can still taste my way back to the childhood living room where I watched episodes of "Silver Spoons" and dreamed of all the possibilities yet to be consumed. Bich Minh Nguyen is the author of the novel "Short Girls" and the memoir "Stealing Buddha's Dinner."