Many years ago, I defined a term for all those things that are bad for you, but nonetheless make something worth eating. That term: Yummy Petrochemical Goodness. I mention this because I think I may have found a measurement of this, at least in some forms of junk food. At my office today I snapped this picture, which I find interesting. They're offering us the ability to choose what snacks will take up the bottom row of the vending machine, also known as the "crap even we engineers feel disgust about eating." What really caught my eye on this was the Shelf Life column, which likely could be a scale for exactly how much Yummy Petrochemical Goodness[YPG] was in each snack. You can sort of see the numbers on these sheets, I'll just point out the surprising bits for me:

Twinkies are ridiculously low for what you would expect, demanding a 14 day shelf life, while their knock off from the Dolly Madison people, Zingers, run about 35 days. Pop-Tarts, from which the original notion of YPG was derived, unsurprisingly has the shelf life at 120 days, but second place goes to the Olde New England Brownie at 84 days. Nothing else is above 60 days. The low mark is Apple or Cherry Turnover at 5 days. This is interesting, as I've never seen these consumed once, I'm wondering if it ever gets used in that shelf span.


Update: I just finished watching Brian Billick's Match Game appearance. Horribly bad play by him.