The Snack Food That’s Sitting in the Millennium Time Capsule
Most people’s main memory as far as time capsules go is the one they made as a special second-grade experiment. Beneath the playgrounds of the world lie thousands of festering shoeboxes filled with half-finished ring pops and a child’s least favorite Pokemon card.
But the landscape is also studded with much more formally prepared time capsules, and one of the most famous is the Millennium Time Capsule. This one was put together and filled by the White House, which is pretty much as official as you can get. This was no discarded sneaker container, either, but a capsule built to spec to stand the test of time, sealed at the turn of the millennium to be opened a thousand years from now.
What was inside? Everything that was judged to be an important part of our society.
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The official White House description starts with a list: music by Louis Armstrong, photos of the U.S. liberating concentration camps, Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, books by William Faulkner. All things that would allow future society to build themselves a little scale model of our culture.
But there’s one item included that the White House seems to have notably left off this list. Ironically enough, it’s probably the one that will give those people a true idea of what our country valued highly. That object is a single Twinkie.
It's no coincidence that Bill Clinton, a man once known for heavy snacking and playing the saxophone, personally vouched for the inclusion of a Twinkie, saying that it was an “object of enduring American symbolism.” He’s lucky they welded that thing shut before the future got a chance to find out about his other hobbies. It’s also presumably partly due to Twinkies’ reputation for lasting literally forever, which isn’t necessarily true. They might not be rotten, but they’ll be about as appealing as cracking open a canopic jar and chugging it.
That’s probably for the best, because if the people in the year 3000 pulled out an edible snack, they’d likely be rightly concerned about what the hell we were putting in our food back then.
