When times are tight and people are hungry, any kind of waste - even the deep-sixing of a truck load of junk food - is taboo.

That may explain why no one seems to want to take the blame for sending what were 2,000 cases of perfectly good snack cakes to the landfill after a Little Debbie truck overturned on Oregon 217 late Monday.

McKee Foods, the Tennessee manufacturer of the sugary snacks, accuses the Oregon Department of Transportation of destroying the high-calorie cargo in its rush to reopen the "flyover" exit ramp crossing Interstate 5.

ODOT, however, said the company told its late-night crash-response crew that its snack rolls were toast once the truck's trailer, with its grinning, country-girl Debbie logo, flipped on its side.

Never mind that the goodies -- from brownies and donuts to Swiss Rolls and Little Debbie's new 100-calorie cookies-and-creme cakes -- remained boxed and sealed up.

"With the Oregon Food Bank having a hard time getting food for the poor, it just seemed like a big waste," said Christine Miles, an ODOT spokeswoman. "There was nothing wrong with the boxes."

Tigard police say the driver of the truck, 34-year-old Justin Rush of Kingman, Ariz., was speeding when he exited I-5 and took the northbound ramp at about 10:40 p.m. "The truck was traveling too fast to negotiate the turn," said Tigard police spokesman Jim Wolf.

The truck and trailer rolled onto the passenger side, skidding before coming to a stop. Rush, who was cited for speeding, wasn't injured. An ambulance took a passenger complaining of back pain to a nearby hospital, Wolf said.

Meanwhile, the Little Debbie truck, which was delivering snack cakes to distributors around the Northwest, blocked the 217 flyover. Despite the impact, the trailer's rear doors stayed closed. No cakes spilled onto the highway.

Chris Sullivan, safety and compliance manager for McKee Foods Corp., said a phone call about the crash woke hime at 1:45 a.m. in Collegedale, Tenn. ODOT said it needed to unload the trailer to tip it upright.

Sullivan said he told state transportation officials that he would send a truck with a local supervisor from McKee's insurance company right to the scene to salvage the cakes.

It would be quick, he promised.

Sullivan said he wanted to save as many cakes as possible to sell for a discount at Little Debbie "thrift stores." But it needed to be supervised by a local quality-assurance specialist.

ODOT responded that it needed to get the freeway open as soon as possible, according to Sullivan.

"Until they tore that trailer open, there was nothing wrong with the food," Sullivan said. "ODOT exposed it to the ground, dump trucks and a front loader."

Miles, however, said the company told its team that snacks couldn't even be donated to the food bank because the crash had made them inedible. "Most of them weren't touched," she said.

ODOT workers spent nearly three hours unloading the boxes from the trailer and putting them in a dump truck.

Tuesday morning, the snacks waited in a pile on the pavement at an ODOT maintenance facility in Washington County. Crows reportedly scavenged in boxes that had busted open as they were dumped at the site. An insurance adjuster waited for dumpsters to arrive.

Of course, the disagreement about who wasted the Little Debbies begs another question: Would the Oregon Food Bank even want something with such little nutritional value?

Everyone has a sweet tooth, said Jean Kempe-Ware, an Oregon Food Bank spokeswoman.

"When people are hungry," she said, "they need calories. Sometimes, it's a nice little treat."

Kempe-Ware said the food bank has staff members who can be called out to check whether food that was thought to be spoiled can is actually still acceptable for consumption.

In fact, she said, a manager with the food bank was in a race this morning against the dumpsters headed to the ODOT facility. Maybe some of the Little Debbies can be saved and the insurance adjuster can be convinced to donate them.

"We don't turn away food," Kempe-Ware said.



-- Joseph Rose; josephrose@news.oregonian.com