Twinkie, Deconstructed

Most books I’ve read about our food supply are written by those who moan and groan about all the processed foods we Americans eat and advocate eating locally. Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle comes to mind.



Steve Ettlinger’s Twinkie, Deconstructed is not one of those books. The subtitle is telling: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats.



His journey started with a simple question from his daughter about an ingredient in her ice cream bar one summer. His perspective is certainly sympathetic to the processed food industry – amazement that technology today can turn something mined into an ingredient that makes the Twinkie a Twinkie.



But I can’t agree with his awe of technology in food. Well, at some level I can, but it is rather horrific reading. I’m not a huge fan of Twinkies, but I can’t say I will ever eat one again after reading this book.



Ettlinger takes us on a journey through the ingredient list from top to bottom, taking us on tours of manufacturing plants and mining operations, explaining how each element makes a Twinkie a Twinkie.



Throughout the book, Ettlinger reveals his support of the processed food industry – just a sampling follows.



Chapter 4: “it is actually harder to extract B vitamins from natural sources than it is to create the synthetically. Even though they are chemically identical, lab-made vitamins are better because they are consistent in strength and quality.” (for enrichment maybe, but certainly not for vitamin supplements!)



Chapter 8: “Besides making Twinkie ingredients, pockle [phosphorus, oxygen, and chlorine] makes an unlikely group of products that includes pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and dyestuffs – but, as industry members say, has been used safely in food for fifty years.” (I’m just wondering, just how does the industry define “safe?”)



Chapter 10: describing soybean processing “The flakes… become shortening, lecithin, or soy protein isolate … - but only with the help of a mildly toxic, explosive solvent, hexane, which is obtained from natural gas and is a common component of gasoline.” (What? Most soy is processed this way, but not all. Don’t you think it’s worth searching for a company that doesn’t use a toxic solvent?)



Chapter 12: describing process of making cellulose gum “[R]olls of “blotter paper” … are ground up and tossed into a reactor vessel to be cooked in a chemical bath containing lye and sodium monochloroacetate, a pungent, toxic, while petrochemical generally associated with making dyes and herbicides rather than a snack food. The resultant mush is washed with water and solvents until it has been transformed into a water-soluble food product.” (I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking YUCK.)



There are more, but I’ll stop there. I found Twinkie, Deconstructed interesting and rather alarming too. Honestly, it made me want to follow in some of my friend’s footsteps and grind my own flour and make my own bread.



One other caveat – I think that a more scientifically-minded person would have found it easier to follow the details of this book. I’m not a scientist, particularly not a chemist, and had to skip over some of those details.



Despite that, Twinkie, Deconstructed was certainly worth the time to read – it made me think and I learned a lot about the processed food industry in our country.