What happens if Twinkies really do go away?

"Something about it just absolutely grabbed the popular culture imagination," says Marion Nestle, a New York University professor of nutrition and food studies — and no fan of junk food. "It's the prototypical indestructible junk food. It was the sort of height to which American technological ingenuity could go to create a product that was almost entirely artificial, but gave the appearance of eclairs."

When Twinkies signed on as a sponsor of the "Howdy Doody" show during the 1950s, their cultural legacy was sealed. Taglines such as "The snacks with a snack in the middle" began etching themselves into generations of young minds and it was considered perfectly fine that Twinkie the Kid would lasso and drag children before stuffing his sugar bombs in their faces.

It was the snack cake heyday. Twinkies were being deep-fried at state fairs, doing cameos in movies like "Ghost Busters" and "Die Hard" and being pushed by Spider-Man in comic books. A pre-vegan President Bill Clinton even signed off on including Twinkies in the nation's millennium time capsule (the two-pack was later removed and consumed by his council overseeing such matters for fear mice would add themselves to the time capsule).

Sure, not all the attention was positive. Somewhere along the line, Twinkies became the butt of jokes, mostly about their perceived longevity (though Hostess staunchly maintains 25 days is the max). And not all associations were great. The so-called "Twinkie defense" came out of the 1979 murder trial of Dan White, whose lawyers included his junk food obsession among the evidence of his supposed altered state of mind.

Then something happened. Suddenly, Americans who for decades had been tone deaf to how food was produced suddenly started paying attention, seeking out organic goat cheeses made from the milk of an unoppressed herd raised on a fence-free collective within a 20-mile radius of home. Even Doritos went artisanal, and an awareness of seasons and availability crept back into the culinary consciousness.

Suddenly products that had so prospered by their artificiality lost their allure. Even Hostess, which blamed this week's shutdown mostly on a labor dispute that hobbled its facilities, has acknowledged that consumer concern about health and food quality changed the game. People just weren't buying snack cakes like they used to.

So what would we lose if Twinkies really did go away? From a culinary standpoint and from a nutritional standpoint, it's hard to love the Twinkie (or pretty much any Hostess product). It's hard not to wonder how the American diet, the American palate, would be different if the parents of the '50s hadn't begun a cycle of turning to processed packages as the de facto snack of childhood.

And does nostalgia alone justify the continuation of something so patently bad for us?

Of course nostalgia, even irony, taste awfully good.

And I notice that a growing number of — dare I say it — artisanal bakeries are going retro, creating their own inspired takes on classic processed snack cakes. Treats like the red velvet "twinkies" at New York's Lulu Cake Boutique. Real ingredients. So perhaps it isn't time for Twinkies to go away. Or to stay the same. Maybe it's time for them to go back to their roots. And then, we lose nothing.

J.M. Hirsch is the AP's Food Editor. Follow him to great eats on Twitter at http://twitter.com/JM_Hirsch or email him at jhirsch(at)ap.org.