When Roger Bennatti arrived in Blue Hill to teach chemistry and physics at George Stevens Academy, he didn’t set out to become the man responsible for preserving the world’s oldest known Twinkie.
But a few years later, in 1976, a student spoke up during a lesson on food chemistry and preservatives to ask how long one of the snack cakes would last.
Bennatti didn’t know, he said, but they could find out. He sent the student to the Merrill & Hinckley store next door to buy a package. Bennatti ate one and set the other on top of the chalkboard.
Half a century later, it still lives at the high school in its own glass case — dry, missing crumbs and likely having absorbed some chalk dust, but otherwise intact.
“The Twinkie and I are a lot alike,” Bennatti now jokes. “We’re old, gray and flaky.”
While he sees it as a funny, feel-good story, the ongoing experiment also shows the power of curiosity and a longer view of science that may be less familiar to people. Along the way, the Twinkie has put the school into the limelight and likely had a hand in the cake’s reputation as a food that could survive the apocalypse.
But for years, it didn’t seem like much to Bennatti or his students. The Twinkie stayed in his classroom for the rest of his career, moving just a few feet to the top of the intercom speaker when the chalkboard was replaced with a thinner whiteboard.
The Twinkie became an international news sensation when Bennatti retired in 2004, after a Bangor Daily News story calling it his legacy caught the attention of other outlets. That year, it moved into the care of Libby Rosemeier, one of his students that fateful day in 1976 who later became a GSA teacher, then dean of students.
“I think that’s the beauty of it, Roger, that you were asked the question and [were] like, ‘Well, let’s find out,’ and so we did,” she said on a December morning when the two reunited to discuss the Twinkie. “For us, that was the big thing. It was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s really going to do this.’”
When the Twinkie moved into her office, her father built the small glass display case it still inhabits, surrounded by a sprinkling of gray crumbs it has shed in the years since.
People weren’t particularly concerned about preservatives at the time either, she added, but the experiment was a catalyst for Rosemeier and her classmates to think more about what was in their food.
The Twinkie’s shelf life was about three and a half weeks, and it technically had just one preservative, sorbic acid, on its ingredient list, according to Steve Ettlinger, who spent five years researching its ingredients for a book on the cakes. Other processed ingredients replace butter, milk and eggs, meaning there’s less in it that can spoil.
Bennatti said the Maine Twinkie’s longevity has also had wide-ranging cultural influence on the cake’s reputation as a food that could last forever, possibly surviving nuclear war or worse.
People sometimes ask if he’s ever heard from the Hostess company, but no: “They want to kill me. They want me dead,” he jokes. “They’re not proud of this.”
He’s also been asked if he would like to taste the Twinkie, to which the answer is also “no”: it’s an ongoing experiment without an end in sight.
Students are only in high school for a few years, and most of the experiments they undertake in class have to be finished in 45 minutes.
“But that’s not necessarily the way science works,” Bennatti said. “Some experiments last much longer. And this is now 50 years and counting, and I think that’s worthwhile.”
Steve Adam, who now teaches science in Bennatti’s old classroom, said it’s a good experiment because of that.
“There are experiments that are finite and have an end time, and then there are experiments that you’re like, ‘Let’s see what happens over time,’” Adam said. “And since time never ends, you know, the experiment’s never going to end. You’re just going to keep looking at the Twinkie as it gets older and older and older.”
Adam refers to it as a Twinkie mummy because it has dried out (desiccation, the teachers note, is another form of preservation). But, notably, the cake isn’t moldy or showing signs of rot like he would expect.
The Twinkie lives in the school’s offices now, making appearances by special request, though executive assistant Gail Strehan said staff are careful not to expose it to direct sunlight for too long.
Bennatti would have liked to see the Twinkie on public display for students, but safety concerns come first.
“You’d have to have some incredibly expensive security system,” he said. “So the system they have here is probably the best.”
Freshmen still seek it out on their orientation scavenger hunts each year, out-of-state visitors have stopped by to see it and the calls from national reporters still come in occasionally.
Safe in its glass home, the Twinkie shows no signs of going anywhere.
“As it stands there, I think it’s pretty much forever,” Bennatti said, the Twinkie in front of him illuminated by a sunbeam in its case. “And that’s what the whole point was.”
