Sawyer loves Twinkies...
...though he has never even tasted one! He loves the sound of it. In his creative writing, almost always Twinkies are there, as the name of a person, the name of a weapon, or the name of a village, etc. He is obsessed with them. Twinkies somehow even appear in his history or science reports--and then I have to make him write all over again.
In English class, he had to write a research paper. He couldn't think anything to write about except Twinkies. His report is below.
Next year we will go to the USA for 3 months or so. There he will have his first bite of Twinkies. I wonder what will happen to his Twinkies fever after that......
Twinkies
by Sawyer Seth
Twinkies are one of the favorite snacks in America. James A. Dewar invented the Twinkie in 1930 during the beginning of the Great Depression. James Dewar worked for the Continental Baking Company. He was afraid that the company would go bankrupt because they had a lot of expensive equipment for making Little Short Cake Fingers. They could only make Little Short Cake Fingers six weeks a year during strawberry season. So he decided to make a new product using the same equipment. First, he injected a banana kind of filling inside a little cake with a syringe- like tool. But because of the war, they had to switch to vanilla flavor. It was so good that even when the war was over they kept using vanilla cream.
There are over 17 Hostess factories scattered around the USA. Together these produce around 500 million Twinkies a year,1,000 a minute ,16 a second, and using at least 40,000 miles of wrap a year. Twinkie production is quite amazing!
Did you know that Twinkies might actually be healthy? Lewis Browning (said to be the “Twinkie king”) ate at least 22,000 Twinkies in his lifetime, and he lived to the nice old age of 89 years. Also, James A Dewar (creator of the Twinkie) lived to be 88 years old. He said that the key to his long life was “to eat a twinkie a day and to smoke a pack of cigarettes.”
There are some very interesting facts about Twinkies. Here are a few: Some people make “Twinkiemisu” (instead of tiramisu), Twinkie sushi and even Twinkie wedding cakes. There is a guy who hung a Twinkie on a black board for thirty years; when he took it down he said, “It was a little brittle but probably still edible.” Another very interesting thing is that the White House put a Twinkie in their time capsule for the new millennium as “an object of enduring American symbolism.”
Before he died James Dewar said that “Twinkies were the best darn tootin' idea” he ever had. I agree. (Well, at least I agree to the name being the best idea he ever had). Perhaps Twinkies should be the American symbol (not the bald eagle), as well as the national fruit!
In the bottom left photo above you can see our pastor (light blue T-shirt) and wife (lavender), Sanjiv & Sushila. Top right photo shows Satoshi sitting with other boys. In the photo just to the upper left of Satoshi's head, you can see Sawyer (green shirt) sitting and enjoying his meal.
During a 3-day church retreat this past weekend, we ate our meals on the rooftop, where caters cooked tasty Indian and Chinese food using some of the equipment shown here! 
