Twinkie Has Barely Changed After 40 Years on Display at Maine High School

Move over McDonald’s fast food, Twinkies have got you beat.

It started as an experiment in 1976 at the George Stevens Academy in Maine. Then-chemistry teacher Roger Bennatti decided to teach his class a lesson on decomposition. According to the Bangor Daily News, he took out an unwrapped Twinkie and placed it atop the chalkboard so he and his students could watch it decompose over time.

Forty years later, it still looks pretty much the same. The Twinkie outlasted Bennatti’s career at the school and now sits in a glass case in dean Libby Rosemeier’s office. It remains completely intact, albeit stale and slightly discolored.

“The most remarkable thing to me is that this is a piece of food that is 40 years old and the shape is basically unchanged,” Rosemeiertold Bangor. “Preservatives work, I guess, to some extent. I think it is dusty more than anything.”

It is worth noting that the Twinkie in 1976 was made by a different company that has since gone bankrupt. Now, Twinkies are said to have a shelf-life of only two weeks, according to Bangor.

Rosemeier was actually in Bennatti’s class in 1976 when the experiment began, and she became the dean of students the same year Bennatti retired. So, he left the Twinkie in her care.

Bennatti said it is important for students to learn that “some scientific experiments don’t take 45 minutes.”

Rosemeier plans to retire soon, however, and said that someone else will likely come forward to volunteer to take care of this Twinkie tradition.

Who knows? Perhaps that Twinkie will even outlast the next generation and the next, and be the sole remaining artifact of human life as we know it.