On the other hand, variants of the Twinkie’s food-safe ingredient sodium acid pyrophosphate are also active in Monsanto’s popular RoundUp weed killer. On the one hand the life of a food engineer is sweet, what with all of the corn syrup, dextrose, glucose and high fructose corn syrup that goes into just one snack cake. Twenty five of 26 chapters in Steve Ettlinger’s Twinkie Deconstructed are dedicated to separate ingredients involved in the Twinkie’s creation, including substances that are challenging not just to the tongue but to the mind and to our health. That’s just a sample of the insights to be found in a book devoted to the snack cake whose parent company filed for bankruptcy in January 2012. There is such a mind-altering quantity of sugar and sugar variants contained in these seductive cakes that the Twinkie Defense was once offered up during a double-murder trial. While it’s true that President Bill Clinton put a Twinkie in a time capsule, it is not true that Twinkies can survive nuclear war. They produce a glimmer in our eye thanks to cotton cellulose, the same substance that gives rocket fuel its shimmery sheen. Consequently, as Hostess plans to permanently close its doors in 2012, this book will provide a relevant guide into the practices of one of the biggest companies of all time.500,000,000 Twinkies are manufactured each year. Beginning at the source (hint: they're often more closely linked to rock and petroleum than any of the four food groups), we follow each Twinkie ingredient through the process of being crushed, baked, fermented, refined, and/or reacted into a totally unrecognizable goo or powder, all for the sake of creating a simple snack cake.Īn insightful exploration of the modern food industry, if you've ever wondered what you're eating when you consume foods containing mono- and diglycerides or calcium sulfate (the latter a food-grade equivalent of plaster of paris), this book is for you. So when his young daughter asked, Daddy, what's polysorbate 60?, he was at a loss and determined to find out.įrom the phosphate mines in Idaho to the oil fields in China to the Hostess factories and their practices, Twinkie, Deconstructed demystifies some of the most common processed food ingredients, where they come from, how they are made, how they are used, and why. And, like most consumers, he didn't have a clue as to what most of the ingredients on the labels mean.
Like most Americans, Steve Ettlinger eats processed foods. A pop-science journey into the surprising ingredients found in most common packaged foods
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