Shelf Life
A common urban legend claims that Twinkies have an infinite shelf life or can last unspoiled for a relatively long time of ten, fifty, or one hundred years due to the chemicals used in their production. This urban legend is false, although Twinkies can last a relatively long time (25 days or more) because they are made without unstabilized dairy products and thus spoil more slowly than most bakery items. In reality, Twinkies are on the shelf for a short time; a company executive told the New York Times in 2000 that the "Twinkie is on the shelf no more than 7 to 10 days."
In the 2012 film Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, the character Blackout has the power to decay anything he touches. When going through a lunch he causes a sandwich and an apple to decay in seconds, then is impressed when he is unable to cause a Twinkie inside the lunch to decay.
In the 2008 film WALL-E, a Twinkie is sighted completely undecayed in its wrapper on WALL-E's truck 700 years after the Earth was rendered largely uninhabitable for organic life forms.
The plot of Family Guy's second season episode titled "Da Boom" has the Griffin family walking to a Twinkie factory in Natick, Massachusetts and creating a new civilization there after society is decimated by a nuclear bomb from the Y2K bug; the joke being Twinkies will be the only food left after a nuclear holocaust.
Conversely, the 2009 film, Zombieland depicts one of the main characters "Tallahassee", played by actor Woody Harrelson on a quest to locate Twinkies, asserting that they do have an expiration date.
The 1988 film, Die Hard has John McClane almost becoming sick after eating a "thousand year old Twinkie" found in an under-construction floor of the Nakatomi Plaza building.
Read more about this topic: Twinky, Cultural References
Famous quotes related to shelf life:
“The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt.”
—John Mortimer (b. 1923)