We love things for so many reasons. Some for what they signify, some for how they affect us, some because of what we can accomplish using them – we have a galaxy of anthropomorphism to help explain the intense love we feel for the dead things of the world. We'll ascribe feelings to our devices, speak longingly of the architecture of our rooms as though they are our lovers, and sigh deliciously at the thread counts that assure us we are living a righteous life.

And perhaps the purest love in a world of commodification is the love that transcends the thing itself … a heady mix of nostalgia, abstraction, and branding.

Friday, Hostess, the seminal American bakery, announced it was declaring a final bankruptcy. It ceased production immediately, and as its halls went silent across the nation, you could hear Americans realizing this was the end of the Hostess Fruit Pie, which has nothing resembling fruit in it, and is only a pie if you have a drunken and scandalous definition of "pie".

So, too, would pass the Devil Dogs, the Ding Dongs, the Funny Bones, and most mysteriously something called "Chocodiles", which I could Google to determine what it actually is, but I am happiest believing is a chocolate-cakey crocodile filled with a slightly sweet frosting made from Elmer's glue, soap, and human tears.

But nothing aroused our pathos like the loss of the Twinkie.

All day long, the scribes of the internet, chained to their iPads with absurdly expensive keyboards, sat in coffee shops in fashionable neighborhoods and thought about what this meant. Hostess gone? This icon, this emblem … you could hear the great wheel spinning and spinning.

And maybe, this was a magical moment in a sense – few times in our history have we yet seen the triumph of branding so complete. Because despite this outrage and despair, beneath the nostalgia and sadness, there are no actual humans who like Twinkies.

Let us be clear, there are millions who respond to the word. Twinkie. And we have its brand associations buried deep in our hippocampus, thrumming and pulsing up against our midbrain. We remember that scene in Ghostbusters when the hypothetical giant Twinkie of ectoplasm would engulf the city, we remember eating them in our youth and in our shameful moments …

But what is interesting is that no one actually likes them.

Urban legends abound about Twinkies. I was always taught that they are foamed and not baked – that the "cream" inside is foamed out of one sort of gun, which I always imagine being wielded by a vicious-looking person out of some cow insemination fantasy. But the "bread" around it is also foamed out of a different gun first, given violent birth onto the assembly line.

In fact, I heard again just now the old gossip that the Twinkies are actually poisonous: the story goes that someone new is working on the line at the bakery, and they say, "Listen, you can have as many Twinkies as you want in the break room. But don't take them from the line – the stuff in them from when they're made has a half-life, it hasn't died yet, and it'll kill you." It doesn't matter if this is true or not, because the mythic resonance is clear – Twinkies taste like they are going to kill you.

All story is struggle. The story this week that won was nostalgia and desperation: the idea we would be deprived of a terrible food we all recognize, despite no one actually liking it. The story that lost was the story of the thousands of workers at the plants who baked (or foamed, it's not clear) that terrible food. The Wall Street firms reorganizing Hostess for profitability had no problem throwing the workers out, preferring to cut and run and sell off the brand.

They reasoned that this was what was valuable – the brand itself. The name. The dream associations that beat in our collective market consciousness … and the media served as proof positive that this was the right call. We never cared about the labor. Neither did Hostess' last six presidents, who mismanaged the firm into the ground. Neither did the hedge funds and equity firms that cut it into pieces and threw away the people.

Almost as soon as Hostess died, bidders appeared for the assets. Capitalism was on the march, and rest assured, the terrible cake will soon be foamed again. The system works to preserve some dreams: the idea of Twinkie, the platonic Twinkie that will sail above us to its new corporate master, now unencumbered by union workers with their standards and families and concerns.

The Twinkie is as free as we are – to buy, to consume, to choke down its calculatedly moist bits.

Try one tomorrow. Open it and it all comes back: the high tones of saccharine vanilla and, just after you eat it, that distinctive aftertaste. It burns slightly; it's chemical, and speaks of interstate gas station stores, bad choices, and poverty.

There are two in every package so you learn the nature of regret. After you eat the first one, you know enough to stop, but you already know how this is going to play out. The second Twinkie is a promise that no matter how bad you feel, after you eat it you'll feel worse. And yet, you will.

It's quintessentially American. That's why it's iconic.