The One Year Old Cupcakes
By: William Hazel
Tags: Running, Fitness, Health, Mental Health, Nutrition

The One Year Old Cupcakes

And why you should read the food labels

Photo by Nathan Bingle on Unsplash

I grabbed the package of cupcakes on a whim. Leftover from a recent office function, my first thought was to save them for staff. In the comfort of my office, reading the long list of unpronounceable ingredients made it clear that I wasn’t holding cupcakes at all. I was holding something that food science had made look like cupcakes. My wife and I both like to cook, so I knew first hand that a decent cupcake didn’t need over thirty components. I thought for moment about what might happen if I kept them for a while.

I decided I would do an experiment. I put the date on a little sticky on the container, took a photograph from above, and gave it a comfortable place on the office book shelf. The cupcakes were chocolate, wrapped in paper as you’d expect along the bottom, with chocolate icing swirled on top, and coated with multicolored, round shaped sprinkles. The package was clear plastic, with nine individual cupcakes nested in their own spots, covered with a clear plastic snap lid. The lid clicked closed with two tabs on the front edge, but once the seal was broken for the party, the container was by no means air tight. The little cupcakes were from a local grocery store, part of one of the largest grocery chains in the United States. A volunteer with the organization purchased them for the office pot lock from their bakery, found on display in one of those center cap tables filled with packaged goodies and sweets.

My office was in a well ventilated building, with temperatures staying within the 65 to 75 degree range, thanks to a very modern HVAC system. The office is not dark, with one east facing window and another south facing window, allowing for an abundance of light. The cupcakes sat on the second shelf from the top, one of four shelves on the unit. They were never put in the dark, nor were they ever refrigerated.

One month after I put them on the shelf, I took them down for inspection, carefully opening the lid. They hadn’t change in any way.

The cupcakes; now one month old. Author’s photo and Instagram post.

What struck me the hardest was the aroma upon tilting the lid back. These little babies smelled bakery fresh. Fresh like I had just bought them from the shop that morning. The chocolate icing was still in perfect condition, the cakes looked fine, there was simply nothing different to detect. After one month, they were still cupcakes. I was intrigued.

The experiment began in early November, and with cooler temperatures outdoors the HVAC was running a consistent forced air heat through the offices. My office was separate, though the door would very rarely be closed. Now in early December, the treats had about five weeks of the warm office environment. It was hard not to keep peeking, but just after the New Year, we took them out for the cupcakes’ two month inspection. I say we, for the experiment had already become the talk of the office. Three of us opened the lid on month two, savoring, once again, the perfect, just from the bakery scent. The aroma so strong it perfumed the entire office space in minutes.

And the little cupcakes were still picture perfect in every way. The outside label began to show some aging from the glue, but not the cupcakes. The little sharp swirls on the top of the icing still in tact. No signs of any type of mold or decay in any way. Two months old and perfect. I could have put them on the counter for sharing and no one would have imagined their sixty days of shelf time.

This process of the monthly cupcake inspection continued with the same result. Each month, opening the lid brought a bakery fresh smell, with no genuine changes to the cupcakes in any way. By the six month it seemed truly bizarre. I grew rather fond of posting a photo of the unchanged product on my social media each month. The little paper wraps began to decline, but everything food related was the same. We noticed a small crystal of something on one cupcake’s icing, as small as the sprinkles, but that was it. The color of the icing stayed pretty much the same.

The color of the cake stayed the same. The sprinkles didn’t change in any way. No mold. No decay. No discoloration. The one year old cupcakes looked and smelled like they did when first purchased.

The cupcakes; now six months old. Author’s photo and Instagram post.

It’s a simple example of food science instead of food. It’s worth looking at what’s happened to the food chain in the US over the past decades, as science replaced whole food choices at our stores. I don’t have to do any research to grasp that the package of cupcakes isn’t cupcakes at all. It’s chemicals. It’s science. The little ones look like the real deal, smell like they’ve come from Grandma’s oven, and even taste something like you might expect a cupcake to taste like. But they are not cupcakes. They are impostors. Fakes. Frauds. And we eat this kind of stuff every day.

A couple of years before my cupcake experiment, my wife and I stopped in another grocery store, wanting to grab some convenience food instead of cooking that evening. We purchased some chicken through the counter, grabbed a container of mac and cheese, and picked out a chocolate cake dessert from the bakery. The cake was prepacked in the little container, looking like it had been made that day. We had dessert at the end of the night and left our plates in the sink. The cake was gone, but plenty of chocolate swirls and crumbs remained. The next morning we found the sink had a large number of ants. The ants had gathered in groups around the crumbs.

The ants were all dead.

What we had consumed the previous evening wasn’t food. It was poison. Poisonous enough that some crumbs left behind killed an entire colony of ants. They didn’t have time to take it back to their house. The poison was so powerful the little creatures perished right there on the plate. We agreed that morning that we would never purchase or consume another packaged meal from the chain grocery stores every again, and we haven’t.

Many of us in the US are not aware that foods sold to us are not approved for sale is most other industrialized nations. Entire societies have banned GMO based products and much of the food science that drives grocery store profits to record numbers here at home. Rummage through the frozen food section of your big chain options, and you will find hundreds of choices. Go from freezer to freezer, section to section, and look at the ingredients. You’ll discover that regardless of what the product looks like on the box, it’s made out of very similar bases of soy and corn syrup, and the chemical mixes that make it all smell and taste like the real thing.

Those same products are being served to us in the big chain restaurants. Many of the dinners arriving at your table have come out of the microwave. They are quite literally frozen dinners. They’ve been shipped to the restaurants instead of the grocery stores. They come to you looking like someone in the kitchen has prepared them. They haven’t. The cooks are simply serving you pre-made science.

On a recent trip to the western side of our home state of Virginia, my wife and I stopped in a local restaurant for dinner. We ordered some potato skins for an appetizer.

When they arrived we realized we were being served the exact same product we get from a local restaurant in our home town on the eastern side of the State.

We don’t order them anymore at our local restaurant because they quality is so bad. Now, some 200 miles from home, the same potato skins arrived. Everything about the appetizer was the same, for it was coming from the same large food company delivering this microwaved dish to restaurants all around the county.

Another personal example is an evening we stop at a local market for some chocolate sauce. The locally owned shop is a classic gas station and convenience store targeting customers in two large nearby campgrounds. We felt like making sundaes at home, and already had the ice cream, the nuts, even the cherries. What we needed was some chocolate sauce to make our Friday night come together. Surely the camping store will have some chocolate sauce. As expected, they had a shelf will several options. You would recognize all the major labels. Looking at the labels, however, revealed none of them had chocolate as an ingredient. They offered the usual corn syrup and science. They looked, smelled, and tasted like chocolate, but alas, didn’t actually have the most important ingredient in any of them. We tried one more store near our home with the same result. This time the shelf had five other options, with none of the bottles containing anything resembling chocolate.

We make every effort, each and every week, to carefully look at the food we purchase and consume. There are very few organizations offering genuine education about our choices. We do like the Environmental Working Group nonprofit that independently tests food and beauty products for safety. And we are thankful to not live in a food desert. We are able to purchase whole foods, organic foods, and have choices of packaged items that are preservative and chemical free. But it doesn’t come easy. We focus on our choices carefully for as the food science gets better at the masquerade, it gets harder to tell the difference at first glance. Read the labels and think about it. Think about what healthy choices look like.

The cupcakes; comparison of photos taken one year apart. Author’s photos.

I kept those cupcakes another three months just for the heck of it. Nothing changed. And to answer your question, yes, before I tossed them, I took a bite. And you guessed it, the little cupcake tasted like a little cupcake should. That delicious smell across my face. That sweet of the icing blending with the soft, chewy cake. It was still perfect inside and out. Perfect science. Don’t let anyone tell you that America doesn’t have science anymore. We’re eating it. We’re eating it every day.