2.8 billion Twinkies is a lot of Twinkies

We’ve already documented that at least $1 billion in taxpayer dollars directly subsidize the production of junk food ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oils that are the main ingredients in Twinkies, soda and other junk food products. If you spent all that money on Twinkies, it would be enough to buy about 2.8 billion of those golden colored sweets (at the estimated wholesale rate of 36 cents per Twinkie), or about 19 Twinkies per taxpayer.

But the fun math doesn’t need to stop there, especially when we’re talking 2.8 billion Twinkies. Consider:

A Twinkie is roughly 4 inches x 1.5 inches x 1.5 inches (forgive my rough conversions from cm). If you stacked 2.8 billion Twinkies on their long end, you get a chain 175,000 miles long (1 mile = 5280 feet). That’s about 7 times the circumference of the earth (Earth is 24,901 miles around).  If you drove a car nonstop at 60 mph, it would take you four months to get to the end of the chain.

Another, closer to home way of looking at it: 2.8 billion Twinkies could easily carpet 6 lanes of I-5 between Portland and Ashland (Assuming minimum required interstate lane width of 12 feet and 286 miles of I-5 between the two cities)—a Twinkie superhighway!

Any other fun ways to slice the Twinkie?