Hostess Cup Cakes

What’s in a Hostess Cup Cake? I’d imagine that there was flour, chocolate, milk, eggs, and sugar. Or at least, that’s what I’d use to make cupcakes. However, the actual ingredients include a lot more than just what I listed. Namely, corn starch, alkali, cellulose gum, gelatin, agar, and a variety of other things nobody understands. I’m sure a cupcake made at home using my ingredients would taste different from the Hostess one, however I settle for the Hostess Cup Cake because I didn’t have to make it. I settle for convenience.

Now if Hostess decided to make a low calorie version of that same cupcake, I think the number of ingredients would rise and include many more things I’ve never heard of. But I’d probably settle for that one too. Less calories. Less fat. Convenient.

I tend to think that as a society we seem to be consuming more things out of convenience. So I was surprised when, last week, I proposed that virtual food might actually be better for us than real food and they didn’t agree.

Of course, there is currently no such thing as “virtual food”. However, let’s pretend that in the future there will be. Or better yet, let’s take that scene from The Matrix where the awakened humans aboard the Neb are eating the oatmeal slop and complaining about it. If they could create their own version of the matrix for combat training, why couldn’t they create one for eating. They could jack into the matrix, have the oatmeal slop fed to them or get nutrition intravenously, meanwhile enjoying a steak in their mind. I have a feeling we’ll be able to manipulate our brains in the same way one day.

My students said, “but that wouldn’t be eating.”

Wouldn’t it? Did the original Hostess Cup Cakes invented in  1919 contain Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, or Propylene Glycol? I think not! But we eat them now that they do. Meanwhile, we never think about what it took to make them, how far they traveled, or the amount of damage the package does to the environment. A virtual cup cake wouldn’t do any damage to the environment or even have to be made. $0 labor, $0 shipping, $0 recycling. Yet, money would still be spent on marketing and paid for the product. In what green economy doesn’t this sound right? It’s the current model driving MP3 sales right? I’m sure it would only cost a fraction of what it now costs for the (already cheap) Hostess Cup Cakes as well.

If you said I could eat cupcakes everyday, not gain a pound, and only slightly know that it wasn’t a real Cup Cake. I’d try one. Sounds healthy. Sounds environmentally friendly. Sounds convenient.