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Over eight years ago, Colin Purrington heard that Hostess, the maker of the iconic American snack the Twinkie was going out of business, so he purchased a few of the sweet sponges. He left them in the basement, where he promptly forgot about them.
A couple of weeks ago Purrington had a craving for sugar. “When there's no desserts in the house, you get desperate," he told Nell Greenfieldboyce of NPR.
Twinkies have an official shelf life of 45 days, but there is a widely-held myth that the humble Twinkie holds the key to eternal shelf life, and will last indefinitely. So, when Purrington opened the long-forgotten packet of cakes, the first one looked ok, and he bit into it.
“It tasted like old sock," he told NPR. "Not that I've ever eaten old sock."
Things got interesting when Purrington took out the remaining Twinkies in the packet. One looked unblemished, rather like the one he’d just sampled, and another had a weird coin-sized blotch on it. But a third had undergone some kind of transformation, and become completely mummified.
The soft yellow sponge had somehow transmogrified into a wizened grey shell of its former self. A zombie-like grey had taken over the once enticing golden treat, and the Twinkie had vacuum-packed itself into its own packaging, suggesting that whatever it was that had transformed it had consumed all the air in the wrapper.
Purrington, a former biology professor, took to Twitter to pose the conundrum: was this “something a fungus or bacteria does” or was “some abiotic chain-reaction taking place?”
The Twinkies caught the attention of mycologists Matthew Kasson and Brian Lovett of West Virginia University, who had previously investigated the interaction of fungi with sugary snacks. Kasson told Susie Neilson of Business Insider, that the Twinkie “look[ed] like a mummy finger”.
Kasson arranged for Purrington to send the Twinkies to their lab, where they used a state-of-the-art bone marrow biopsy tool to extract core samples. The scientists then placed the samples in petri dishes allowing the culture to grow.
"Cladosporium is one of the most common, airborne, indoor moulds worldwide," Kasson told NPR, adding that they can’t confirm the species until they conduct a DNA analysis.
No ground-breaking discoveries were made, but the next step was to place the Twinkie under an electron microscope where the fungi was examined at 100 times magnification. It appears that whatever was active within the Twinkie had probably died, but the researchers are continuing to try and coax whatever it was back to life by feeding it other enticing sugary snacks.
"You end up with a vacuum," Lovett said. "And very well that vacuum may have halted the fungus's ability to continue to grow. We just have the snapshot of what we were sent, but who knows if this process occurred five years ago and he just only noticed it now."
For these scientists, it’s exciting for a story like this to get global coverage. It coincides with a renewed interest in mycology and the transformative potential of fungi in health and medicine. Of course, fermentation and the use of fungi in cooking has been growing healthily in the last few years, with seemingly infinite potential for their application in our dishes.
The Twinkie recalls happier days, a more optimistic time, and is a symbolic comfort food from many Americans' childhoods. So to see it transformed in such a shocking way made people sit up and take notice, especially in the middle of a pandemic.
"When those memories are tainted by a visual reality like the Twinkie experiment, we are kind of caught off guard," Kasson told NPR. "We're like, no, that's a symbol of my childhood! You can't take that from me, too.'"
Lovett agrees. "We're living in a time where we're all really grappling with our mortality," he says. "Eventually, all of us are food for fungi. Seeing that is sort of facing the reality of our mortality and our destination."
