Twinkies can kill you — as well as offering a defense against murder — and I was so pleased to learn this week that Hostess are filing for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11.

Hostess Brands, the maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, filed for bankruptcy today, just three years after the company last emerged from insolvency.

The firm has been a victim of economic turmoil, and of health-conscious consumers turning away from Hostess’ famous range of junk foods. …

With one third of adults in the U.S. being medically obese, as well as 17 per cent of children, the public mood has turned against high-fat, sugary foods like those made by Hostess.

Pundits are blaming the bankruptcy on bad business practices and a pernicious union pension fund Hostess can no longer abide, but I argue if people were really hungry to buy Hostess products, the company would be able to cover all union obligations.

The fact is that Hostess creates and distributes bad stuff — I refuse to call their stuff “food” — that slowly kills us.  Hostess are perpetrators of the longest mass suicide in the history of the universe as so many of us poison ourselves in a silent, shameful, unison with each bite and mouthful.

Foul companies with dangerous products deserve to be beaten down in the marketplace and face a necessary and inevitable death.  Hostess provides a massive sugar rush to a nation that cannot control its hunger for escaping an ever-looming, and cross-generational, national depression.  We turn to the dispensary of our kitchens and we feed our faces with sugar to cover the hurt and the loss and the inescapable sense of a dying self-preservation — and Hostess are right there to help us swallow their junk so it can turn to fat and poison us from the inside with chemicals and preservatives.

I’m sure Hostess will come out of their bankruptcy just fine — Chapter 11 is clearly a union-busting move — and they’ll be back down our throats again in no time and I hope this time we, together as a nation, can somehow repudiate their poison in the marketplace.

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  2. UPDATE:

    It is over and done:

    Adieu, Twinkies, at least for now. Hostess Brands said Friday it has asked a court’s OK to liquidate the company, spelling the possible end for the iconic, yellow, cream-filled delight.

    The move shuts down one of the nation’s oldest and largest producers of baked goods. Founded in 1930, it produces such well-known brands, aside from Twinkies, as Ding-Dongs, Ho Ho’s, Sno Balls and Donettes, not to mention Wonder bread, which the company says is the best-selling white bread in the United States.

    In a statement, Hostess said its bakery operations have been suspended at all plants and that it would lay off most of its 18,500 workers to focus on selling its assets. It said it has filed a motion with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court seeking permission to close its business and sell its assets, including 33 bakeries and 565 distribution centers.

    http://www.nbcnews.com/business/hostess-maker-twinkies-ding-dongs-says-closing-business-1C7112898

    Sure, it’s sad all those people are out of work — but at what cost was their employment to our national health? Hostess Brands were killing our guts, and if this is now the proper ending to help discourage a life-terminating diet, then let it be so.

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