A disturbing Twinkie that has, so far, defied science | Hacker News Reader

A disturbing Twinkie that has, so far, defied science

npr.org

142 pointsbrundolf109 comments

Fun fact: the owner of the Twinkies was a tenured biology professor at Swarthmore College (a top-rated liberal arts college in the US) who left his tenured position after 14 years. It is pretty rare for folks to leave tenured posts in academia, given the decent pay, extraordinary job security, and relative enjoyability of the work.

https://colinpurrington.com/about/

https://www.nature.com/articles/nj7425-627a

He also mantains some great guides e.g. on scientific poster design[1] and keeping a lab notebook[2]. I remember he even tested the solvent resistance of different pen inks, but cannot find the link.

EDIT: Found it in a previous version (https://web.archive.org/web/20181112011236/http://colinpurri...).

[1]: https://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design/

[2]: https://colinpurrington.com/tips/lab-notebooks/

This makes me think of Steve1989MREInfo on YouTube. Except he reviews military rations and has eaten ones a lot older than 2012.

It's great to see someone from that very niche community has become so popular today. That's a very entertaining military history lesson and Steve was always the funniest (in a very dry way).

I love that channel! I was really impressed when he attempted to eat the Civil War-era hardtack.

"It tastes like mothballs. Maybe because it was stored with mothballs."

The amount of history that has traversed that man's stomach is incredible.

Was at a friend’s house in like middle school or something. Went to get a big glass of milk from the fridge after playing outside.

Pour into glass, don’t pay close attention, take a big swig and my mouth fills with curdling milk that my friends mom was going to use for baking or whatever you’d use curdled milk for.

Still vividly remember the texture and the taste... so disgusting.

Reminds me of a strawberry about 10 years ago. Beautiful, big, red, unmarred strawberry. I take a bite out of it, and as I pull it away from my mouth I see that the entire inside is filled with the remaining half of a living worm, along with a great deal of what I assume were its excretions. I see this just as the taste hits me.

My wife heard the noise I made from across the house and assumed I was being histrionic, but she changed her mind once she saw the remains of the strawberry! In fact I think she came closer to vomiting than I did—fortunately I was right in front of the sink, so was able to spit it out and wash out my mouth immediately... It was years before I ate another strawberry without first cutting it in half.

Harvested some legal cannabis recently and on the advice of some forum users decided to try washing my buds. I'm damn glad I did. It was a three bucket rinse, the first with lime juice in hot water, then hot water, then cold water. I thought it was some hippy bullshit, but I had little to loose.

The first bucket was just pitch black by the end of the washing. I dumped out the water straight into the toilet and soot dripped out at the end. Then I gagged when I saw probably two dozen drowned caterpillars by the end of all the washing.

Who knows how much ash, pollution, and insect I've been smoking all these years.

I mean, the ash part is kind of inevitable.

Just did a hydrox dip after harvest about a week ago. Water didn't go black but it fizzed up pretty bad and had a lot of crap in it by the end. Couldn't even see the bottom of the wash bucket by the end.

Dunno what you did that yours turned black, are you sure you didn't get a bunch of soil in the water? There shouldn't be tar or ash on live weed plants.

It does make me question smoking any undipped pot though.

It was probably from the wildfires this season, although I do live 2000 feet from a freeway.

Were you growing indoors or outdoors? We got pretty smokey here from the wildfires, like a few weeks of constant haze, itching eyes and tasting and smelling smoke. I had not filters on the intakes or anything. The freeway may not help either.

This was outdoor.

Are you on the West coast of North America? I wonder if the black was from wild fire smoke/ash.

Yep and it probably was. There were a few days before harvest where the air tasted like campfire, and the nearest fire was 50 miles away.

Reminds me of the time I bit into a big juicy overripe peach I'd just picked from the tree in our back yard. What seemed like hundreds of earwigs poured out, crawling all over my hand with some in my mouth.

Back when my daughter was an infant, I got up for one of those late night feedings. The goal was to not fully wake myself up, so I kept all the lights off. But since I was up anyway... why not have a little midnight of that leftover birthday cake on the counter?

I cut a slice in the dark kitchen and took a big bite. Why does this cake taste exactly like bleu cheese? OH SHIT.

Turned on the light and discovered I was eating cake covered in giant blotches of blue-black mold. It took a long time to get the taste out of my mouth.

relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GurNiNV5XvY

I always smell the milk and look at the texture being poured before drinking milk.

Amusing: once had milk that was well past the date, but not stinky, microwaved it (kid liked it warm for cereal - don't judge) and it curdled after being warmed. Tasted like fresh yoghurt. I didn't eat the whole thing.

You can use it to flavor baked goods or cheesy dishes. It can also be used to make cottage cheese or yogurt.

If you plan to cook with it, read up on what you're doing beforehand, and be aware that curdled milk and spoiled milk and VERY DIFFERENT THINGS.

I sometimes freeze milk, so the sell-by date is no indicator of how long it may have been in the fridge.

To point out a key difference between curdled and spoiled, there's not necessarily any smell or texture to indicate that milk has spoiled, and it isn't necessarily 'sour'.

For instance, my senses told me the tall glass I poured from a jug dated six months prior and downed half of in one gulp was regular milk at first, but if you'd blindfolded me, I'd have sworn from the coating left in my mouth and throat after I'd swallowed that I'd just drunk a glass of fish sauce. Its odor wasn't even detectable until the milk had warmed.

I surprisingly didn't get sick at the time, but just thinking about it now gets me very close.

How does something "defy science"?

Maybe it's meant as an idiom to mention a deviation from what is available in 'science' as a domain?

Yeah reading about the fungi makes that title even more clickbait.

How so? The thing that defied explanation was the fungi, not the twinki itself.

I would take that phrase to mean "has not yet been explained by science".

As for this article, I am not really sure how this applies at all. Seems decently explained by "spores got in before sealing".

Yeah I think that's the thing. Science is that process of exploration...figuring it out. This is 'disturbing twinkie' and the investigation is the definition of science.

NPR is just as bad as Buzzfeed with it's sensationalist headlines.

Not get vaccinated and refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic?

It's been hard to get respect since scientists admitted they didn't know how bees could possibly fly.

An amusing though factually incorrect trope.

God stories defy science, I guess...

"I have an extensive collection of mold, spores, and fungus."

"Tell em about the twinkie."

"What about the twinkie?"

Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind?

I believe that's actually Ghostbusters.

“Egon, your mucus”

My Dad used to recommend removing mold from food. Said they used to do it when he was growing up. My sister the Nurse suggested "Dad, in the old days, people used to die for no reason."

So I don't eat moldy stuff any more.

Wat.

Yeah, I don’t get it either. Unless the point is that you should completely discard the food, rather than trying to remove the moldy bit and eat the rest?

People never died for no reason, though, they just didn’t understand the reason at the time. The implication is that they thought they had removed the mold and they hadn’t and so they died?

This is from the article:

> Purrington, meanwhile, has reflected on his Twinkie experience. While his father had no objection to eating moldy foods, he recalls, his mother generally treated "sell-by" dates with more respect.

So I assume the top-level comment is a confirming anecdote.

The article also says that he thought the Twinkie looked fine before he ate it. So it seems that by checking how it looked and ignoring the age of the product he was in the middle-ground between his mother (respect the sell-by date) and his father (happy to eat moldy foods) :)

Yes, the point is that it's often unsafe to eat a food item that has gone mouldy, even after removing the visibly mouldy bits.

The implication of the "people used to die for no reason" line is that 'we always did x in the old days' isn't necessarily a good argument for the safety of x. The link between action and consequence is often obscure, especially for the class of actions that usually turn out fine.

As in, his dad used to just cut mold off of food / remove the one moldy berry / whatever.

OC just throws it away because he has decided that where there is smoke there is a fire.

Really depends on the food / mold though.

I believe they meant to say "my Dad used to recommend not removing mold from food".

I had an older coworker who used to do this, and had no qualms eating moldy food. He had some advanced biology degrees and worked in a lab. When asked why he ate moldy food, he would reply "Most of the time the mold (some mold type) and is mostly harmless to people. The trouble is knowing what is and isn't ok to eat. Besides, I'm not letting safe food go to waste."

On the other hand, I knew a foreign student who disappeared from classes for 6 weeks. When asked about him, we were told that he had been in the hospital for some time because he had nearly died from eating moldy chicken. When he returned near the end of the semester he looked like a skeleton having lost more than 40 lbs on a super skinny frame.

The kind of mold is important here. Mold on cheese is often not harmful to people. Mold on meat is typically indicative of stuff that will peel out your insides.

Lot of people I know pay more for moldy french cheese. It obviously does not work for all cheeses, but for most you can just cut it off.

The rule of thumb I've picked up somewhere is that for hard cheese you can just cut mouldy bits off. For soft cheese you should throw it out.

This is of course talking about the kind of mould that grows on it while its in your fridge. Not the outer layer some cheeses acquire during production.

The soft cheeses from france are often quite moldy. I'm not a big fan of them but my family eats them ; the moldier and smellier, the better.

IIRC, all cheese has mold. Some of the mold is safe and/or desirable to eat (blue cheese's blue is mold).

But those soft cheeses can grow other mold: If it does this, you have to throw it all out as it could be dangerous. In general, you don't want mold where you didn't expect it.

Sorta. Fresh cheeses, like curds or paneer, don't have significant bacteria or mold colonies, outside whatever natural stuff happens to be on all food. All aged cheeses have bacterial colonies, that's what does the aging, fermenting the milk's sugars into acid and other tasty byproducts. Some cheeses have mold as well, but not all. Usually it's on the surface, and breaks down the milk's proteins which turns it soft. That's why when you slice into brie or camembert, the outside is the softest part: the white, fuzzy mold on the outside has done its work on the proteins there. Blue cheese has holes poked in it where they insert the blue mold spores, to more evenly colonize the entire cheese instead of the outside.

Many cheeses actually benefit from acquiring wild mold colonies. There are ways to tell which molds are "good" and which are "bad," which home cheesemakers can learn. Here[1] is a properly aging cheddar, wrapped in bandages and allowed to mold. The mold gives some flavors, but more importantly dries out the cheese's exterior and acts as a guard to prevent nasty bacterial infections from getting into the "good stuff" in the middle.

[1] https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/cheesemaking-supply-co/ad..., from https://cheesemaking.com/collections/recipes/products/chedda... . More information here https://cheesemaking.com/blogs/learn/how-to-bandaging-chedda... .

That makes a lot of sense, considering that we’re made of meat. A mold that grows on meat could grow on us.

Mold on meat == bad? Not entirely. I'm fine and I've on occasion and unintentionally eaten moldy beef jerky. Probably the water content determined mold strain prevalence.

That's mold on a preserve. It's a completely different ecosystem. My personal theory is the stuff that kills us, usually will also kill an animal, so the really deadly fungi and bacteria usually don't form until after the animal has died and the immune system has stopped functioning. That's why raw meat from a fresh kill is generally safe but if the meat is left alone for too long it becomes poisonous.

I think you're basically right. Many of the major foodborne pathogens are mammal or vertebrate-specific.

Given a choice, I'd eat a pound of grapes rotten to a mush before I ate a bite of green raw chicken.

Where I live there was recently the case of a woman that is now permanently disabled (botulism) after eating an expired commercial vegetables soup, it’s not mold but be careful with not meat = harmless.

My dad was always worried about botulism. I don't know what happened, but he would refuse to eat dented cans and things like that, just in case.

Botulism is why home canning is dangerous - more so than a factory.

Maybe lived through the famous nationwide botulism scare (the reason black olives are in cans to this day).

Source? All I found was in line with https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/botulism-outbreak-gav... that covered olives being part of the scare, but no source said black olives were only to be sold in came because of it.

I also thought black olives can be purchased in glass jars ...

That was 1919: My dad was born in the 50's. His grandparents would have lived through it, though I'm not sure if one half was in the US at the time. I'd ask why, but he died some years back. I know that particular botulism outbreak still affects folks' attitudes towards pans.

I figure it was either stories from his parents - his father ran a grocery for some years. I know they had cans with missing labels around, but I don't think they had dents. Or it could be that someone (maybe him) got really sick. I just cannot remember - either one would make my father anxious, though. (He was cautious with car jacks, and always put a tire underneath. Something happened to someone he knew).

I do know that canned goods have gotten a bit safer, but not if the can has been dented or damaged.

There are fermented raw meats that people seem to be able to eat safely. Lookup "high meat", it's a trend among people doing the raw carnivore diet.

I mostly eat cooked foods, but it's interesting to think about what fermented, rotten foods people have been eating for thousands of years.

Chicken is notorious for developing bad bacteria when it gets old. I know two people who got badly sick from eating chicken, and so they'll never ever eat it again. I like it though, but I'll never eat it past the expiry date.

AFAIK if meat products start smelling, especially ammonium, then it's time to ditch it.

Exactly. If you aren't careful around chicken it's almost Darwin at work.

I assume this is why chicken is usually overcooked in restaurants.

I recently learned that eating raw chicken is possible (Torisashi in Japan).

Torisashi causes a lot of food poisoning.

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2019/11/study-reviews-campylo...

> Rise in eating raw chicken meat and liver

> Between 1997 and 2018, the number of incidents and patients varied from 257 to 645, and from 1,551 to 3,439, respectively. One large outbreak involved 875 patients and was traced to sushi topped with raw or undercooked chicken at outdoor events in Metropolitan Tokyo and Fukuoka Prefecture in 2016.

> Epidemiological investigations of Campylobacter infections have shown that chicken meat products are the most important source of infection. Consumption of raw chicken meat and liver is not common but has been increasing.

Our dog once ate some bad meat and got sick. Since then we’ve used her nose to tell us of questionable meat is bad or not. If she will eat it, it’s okay. So far she hasn’t lead us astray.

My dog has a great nose and loves to dig up the nuts squirrels bury in our yard for a snack. But he also eats cat poop so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> AFAIK if meat products start smelling,

The smell is telling you that the meat is rotting and needs to be destroyed. But meat that is fresh and has no bad odour can be contaminated. You cannot use smell to tell if meat is contaminated or not.

We don't eat raw chicken, even if it's very fresh, because of the risk of food poisoning from things like campylobacter.

You need to be careful with cooked then chilled rice because of the risk of bacillus cereus. It won't smell bad. It can be an unpleasant food poisoning.

Chicken doesn't need to be bad or even have a smell to make you sick: It merely needs to be improperly stored or improperly cooked. Back when I ate meat, I tended to overcook chicken if I couldn't test the temperature (and preferred it a bit overcooked, honestly).

My old-aunt (not sure if that is something in English but she was an aunt of my father) and her husband ate only expired food until they died (both over 95, aunt over 100); I was, as a kid, always disgusted as everything you got there was rotten (fruit etc) and/or had mold (bread) ; they just cut it off or even just ate it. Because they had a house close to my uni, I lived with them for a while as a student and it was horrible; I eventually got a little fridge in my room as simply everything was expired, and then some. They survived 2 wars and, although they had plenty of money, they knew (and wanted to??) how to live of nothing. So they bought or got (for free) only expired food. They also were very religious and that helped with the money thing; they both washed with cold water their whole life and the heating in the house (in the netherlands!) was generally off; there was ice inside my room as a student. I knew more (as in; yes they were weird to me but not so much for the generation) people who survived the 2 wars who could not shake this kind of thing even though after those events they made a good to great living.

I can’t speak for all English speakers, but we would call that a great-aunt. Basically any time you go up a generation, you add “great-“ so my grandmother’s grandmother is my great-great-grandmother.

Ah yes ofcourse, thank you, I should've known that.

Or 'grand-' as in 'grand-aunt', 'grand-mother' etc. Which sounds better, more 'grand' :)

I like saying up 3, down 1 :)

Fascinating story! Thanks for sharing it.

Where would the ice form in your room?

I'm guessing under the windows

Inside (and outside) of the windows (the entire glass had ice on both sides => no double glazing) and parts of the floor if water flew in before (which it did).

I recognise this behaviour. It's common when people go through extreme hardship, they naturally understand that their world is not secure[0] so they try to buffer against it. Money and food typically.

[0] something who've had it easy don't learn, so they assume that everything will be alright, always. It won't.

Hey me too! Used to have ice on the inside of my windows every morning in the winter, in my corner bedroom in our Iowa farmhouse. Before remodelling to a ranch-style, it was 2-story with no heat whatsoever in the upstairs where the kids' bedrooms were. We slept 3 to a bed with huge comforters. Even after the remodel, still ice on the windows. No heat got to my corner of the house.

And cold water - got a water heater (I don't remember when) but not enough capacity for 8 people. As a child I resisted bathing as long as I could get away with it. As a youngest, I was last in line for the hot water.

But not so much with the food. Iowa farm - always good fresh food available. So that was fine.

Ice still forms on the inside of my well-insulated, double-paned windows most nights during the (Minnesota) winter with the thermostat set for 66 or 67 degrees Fahrenheit. I've always thought it was the condensation freezing from humid air hitting the freezing-cold window.

I'm sure that extremely cold inside temperatures would exacerbate the problem, though.

Today we should expect double-glazed windows. The inner pane is supposed to be near room temperature. So ice inside means something is not quite right!

The inside is near room temperature most of the year, but not when it gets down to -20 degrees Fahrenheit (or about -30 Celsius) regularly here. Some amount of ice seems to form on the bottom of the bedroom window any time that the temperature is below around 0 deg F outside.

I did a little research and this seems common in the Upper Midwest climate. R3-rated double-paned windows (which is what I have, I'm pretty sure) can still get pretty cold on the inside when the outside temperature is sub-zero. My heavy blackout shade usage probably further decreases the temperature at the window, since there's no warm airflow across the glass.

I consider this totally normal. I think it's very wasteful to throw out food over a little bit of localized mold, especially things like bread which can form it very easily.

As long as it doesn't smell or taste off and it's not a known dangerous food I eat it. I have never had good poisoning in my life afaik.

As soon as there is mold it goes. I'm not risking anything.

Some things are safer than others to cut off, though. Bread, for example: When you see mold on a loaf of bread, it really is better to throw it out because it has already compromised the entire loaf by the time you see it. Bread mold generally won't kill you, but can cause infections and allergic reactions in some folks, especially if their immune systems are compromised.

> throw out food over a little bit of localized mold, especially things like bread which can form it very easily

You trust too much on human sight. The part that is visible is visible because the colony has grown to immense density and it's also the part that serves reproduction (the body of mold that sits on the surface spreading spores) : if you can see a spot of mold on the bread, there is, without a doubt, a lot of mold you are not seeing elsewhere on the bread, just not as much concentration as that patch of mold.

Now, if you're young, healthy and don't stumble upon a particularly toxic variety of mold, the danger isn't particularly manifest. But the risk is not worth it still.

>"We don't recommend cutting mold off of bread, because it's a soft food," says Marianne Gravely, a senior technical information specialist for the United States Department of Agriculture. "With soft food, it's very easy for the roots [of the mold], or the tentacles, or whatever creepy word you want to use, to penetrate" deeper into the food.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/04/21/523647669/is...

Our eyes are not microscopes. The parts you think are safe aren't.

Generally the rule is that if it's hard, you can cut it off, because the mold will have only spread on the surface (think moldy cheddar cheese rind), but if it's soft, throw it out (think blue cheese).

It's been a long, long pandemic...

A few years ago I would commonly grab a box of snack cakes or other dessert / pastry to snack on for the night. I one time pulled a box of the store brand equivalent of swiss cake rolls and started eating. I got through a few before realize they tastes rather off and the texture was odd, checked the date and they were a few years expired. If i recall correctly they were visibly bad but not as explicitly as those twinkled. The were darker in color and somewhat deformed.

I opened a can of soda once and decided to drink out of a glass with ice, which I sometimes did, but not usually. I poured it into the glass and the normally brown soda came out a transparent golden yellow. Then a dark brown muck slowly poured out of the can. None of it was carbonated and it looked like it hadn’t been mixed at all, and maybe had also gone bad. Anyway, I was really glad I decided to use a glass that day. I threw out the rest of the 12-pack and didn’t drink soda for at least a month.

I also once bit into a chicken nugget from a national brand and nearly chipped a tooth on a bone. I’ve eaten a quarter of a sandwich only to discover the far corner of the slice of bread was moldy. I’ve bitten into a nearly raw chicken tender at a restaurant. I’ve had a mouth full of curdled milk. And I’ve eaten from a bowl of cereal and then realized those little red things on my milk weren’t crumbs, they were mites.

37-year-old Twinkie, world’s oldest, still a sweet treat at Blue Hill school https://bangordailynews.com/2012/11/21/news/38-year-old-twin...

What a terrible news site, and not even a picture.

But anyway an important factor with that twinkie is that it has been able to dry out.

UNCG has a donut that's lasted over 40 years.

https://news.uncg.edu/celebrating-40-years-uncg-donut/

The last McDonald's meal sold in Iceland is still around, 11 years later: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-50262547

"That's a big Twinkie."

-- Winston Zeddemore

I opened a glass jar of Indian carrot chilli pickles the other day. "Best before" date was July 2011. It still had the satisfying pop of the vacuum seal. The top layer was a bit discoloured and dry as I guess it was above the pickling liquid. Scooped that bit out and the rest was fine - I survived to tell the tale at least!

Properly preserved stuff in jars can stay good for decades without too much trouble. The tricky bit is knowing if it was preserved properly.

Seems like Wall-E may have been close to non-fiction than fiction.

"A theory must be tempered with reality" -- Nehru

"That's one hell of a Twinkie." -Winston Zeddemore

reddit tier

Well that definitely killed my appetite.

I just flossed my teeth.

3 comments in the past year... all 3 about dental floss, and all 3 totally apropos. A good natured and incredibly patient troll?

Well, just check his username.

Indeed that’s what tipped me off to go check the comment history.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com