Cream passionnel
From Matthew Leeming Sir: In her otherwise admirable discussion of American feeding habits ('American food sucks', 21 August), Ella Windsor missed the most sensational characteristic of the Twinkle cakelet. It can kill, or at least get you off a murder rap in California.
In 1978 Dan White, a former police officer, firefighter and right-wing nutter, shot both the mayor of San Francisco and the first openly homosexual supervisor of the Castro district, Harvey Milk. At his trial, White's lawyers were widely understood (or perhaps misunderstood) to have claimed that his binges on Twinkies and Coca-Cola had so unbalanced his mental state that he was not responsible for his actions. This is now known to the American Bar Association as the 'Twinkle Defense'.
In Oxford I was once lucky enough to be part of a High Table discussion about what wholly original contribution America had made to Western culture. The only example we could come up with was IHOP — the International House of Pancakes.
Matthew Leeming
Old Alresford, Hants
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