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53 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If we are what we eat .... OY!!!, April 23, 2007
This review is from: Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats (Hardcover)
Steve Ettlinger is an interesting man. In about a dozen previous books, he has often demonstrated not only his interest in and concerns about various consumer issues and realities, but has investigated each to a degree not commonly found in books written for the general public. For example, The Complete Guide To Everything Sold In Hardware Stores, The Complete Guide To Everything Sold In Garden Centers, The Complete Guide To Everything Sold In Marine Supply Stores, and Guides For Dummies to both French and Italian wines, he probes each seemingly obvious area to a degree of depth and detail so that more than information is provided: Reading his books can be more accurately characterized as an experience.
In the volume at hand, his newest published effort to date, he chooses one seemingly simple, immensely popular and globally ubiquitous food snack item, the Twinkie to scrutinize, one ingredient at a time, as a sometimes humorous and sometimes gut wrenching example of what has come to pass as food in our times. He is not picking on these readily recognizable little cream-filled snack cakes. Rather, he is using them as a paradigm representative example of how foods and non-foods alike are processed and folded into our intake supply. He raises more questions than he answers - seeing his responsibility as primarily that of providing consumers with information that might be helpful to them.
He researches, visits manufacturing plants, speaks with various company people and winds up with a chapter by chapter analysis of the etiology, processing and purpose of each and every ingredient listed on the Twinkies label. In case you have not read one lately, these include in descending order of volume in the product: Wheat Flour; Bleach; Ferrous Sulfate; B Vitamins - Niacin, Thiamine Mononitrate (B1), Roboflavin (B2) and Folic Acid; Sugar; Corn Sweeteners; Corn Syrup, Dextrose, Glucose and High Fructose Corn Syrup; Corn Thickeners: Cornstarch, Modified Cornstarch, Corn Dextrins and Corn Flour; Water; Soy: Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil and/or Animal Shortening, Soy Lecithin and Soy Protein Isolate; Eggs; Cellulose Gum; Whey; Leavenings; Baking Soda; Phosphates: Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate and Monocalcium Phosphate; Salt; Mono and Diglycerides; Polysorbate 60 (the ingredient his own child asked about that got the author going on this subject); Natural and Artificial Flavors; Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate; Sodium and Calcium Caseinate; Calcium Sulfate; Sorbic Acid; and FD&C Yellow No. 5 and Red No.40. Quite a list from something that looks simple enough to have been made from flour, sugar, water and cream (which it, originally, was!)
I expect that we have all looked at ingredient lists from time to time - some of us with more scrutiny than others - but this analysis of each and every thing that has gone into a particularly well known product is, in my experience, both unique and profoundly informative. Not just about Twinkies but about the nature of our entire food supply, much of which contains various degrees of processed ingredients. This book is, then, a close look at one product but is best understood as a microcosmically specific look at a MUCH larger situation. Processed foods we consume every day.
Bullet statements on the back of the dust cover, raise the aura of the themes presented, documented and offered up for our information and consideration. Among them are:
-Flour dust is explosive
-Homeland Security figures prominently in modern food production
-Glucose, the form of sugar that adds bulk and sweetness to Twinkies' crumb and filling, also adds glossiness to shoe leather and prolongs concrete setting
-The iron compound in enriched flour is also used as a common weed killer
-Only a small percentage of the 750 pounds of cornstarch that's manufactured annually goes into food like Twinkies. Two-thirds is used to make paper, cardboard and packaging "peanuts."
-When cooked, cotton cellulose is transformed into a soft goo, perfect for lending a slippery sensation to the filling in snack cakes - and rocket fuel
-Phosphorous, one of the seven elements necessary for life, is also what puts the glow in tracer bullets and causes artillery shells to explode.
As it turns out, some of the ingredients start off as natural foods and are processed into an entirely unnatural component. Some others are not now nor were they every naturally occurring substances - they are lab creations. Man made chemicals. Some were pretty clearly never intended to be ingested by animals - human or otherwise. Some seem likely harmless while others sound insidiously toxic. From a manufacturing point of view, each and everyone makes sense to achieve one of three basic goals. These are to 1) Extend the shelf life of the product; 2) To keep the cream filling and cake around it from blending into each other while they await consumption and, of course 3) To keep the costs of production as low as possible so as to increase the profit margin to the greatest degree allowable by the FDA.
There are natural, or MORE natural food alternatives to just about everything. Some may be worth a try. I remember swearing off red meat for a year or so after reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in college. I have had a similar reaction to processed "foods" that turn out to contain little if any actual "food" since finishing this book.
If you already have strong opinions about this subject, I doubt that this book will change your mind - unless you are open to having it changed. Whether or not it causes you to rethink some of your eating habits, I think the curious will find it an engaging, entertaining and at times frightening read. Check it out!
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50 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Fun and Follies with Food Facts, July 13, 2007
This review is from: Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats (Hardcover)
Asked by his children what the ingredients in a Twinkie creme-filled cake really were, and where they came from, Steve traveled the world to find out, interviewing over a hundred people in the process. The book is well-written in the sense that it can be read very fast, and is entertaining until the number of technical errors and chemophobia intrude, which for me began on p8. I happen to enjoy processing plant and mine tours, even vicariously, and do not shy from hundreds of facts and factoids. It was fascinating to find where the biggest plants were that made the ingredients of a Twinkie, which are: wheat flour, bleach, iron(II) sulfate, vitamins B1, B2, B3, sugar, corn sweeteners, corn thickeners, water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, lecithin and soy protein isolate, eggs, cellulose gum, whey, leavenings, baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, monocalcium phosphate, salt, mono and diglycerides, polysorbate 60, natural and artificial flavors, sodium stearoyl lactylate, sodium and calcium caseinates, calcium sulfate, sorbic acid, FD&C Yellow No. 5 and Red. No. 40. All but 2 of the chapter headings follow this ingredient list. There is an inadequate index and no references, an ominous sign of what is to follow. There are no pictures or drawings, which this topic screams for. The concept was excellent, as were the metaphors. Between that and the potential entertainment value my rating would have been 5-star, even though the target audience was 12-14 years old, IMHO.
A fine appreciation of food chemistry was finally given on p258-260: "The fact that chemicals, especially those in foods, are part of nature..." Well and good, but Steve infiltrates all kinds of snide comments about "chemicals" almost everywhere else, such as one about the surprising purity of synthetic chemicals as opposed to natural (p208) -- the reverse of the truth -- that most natural chemicals are mixtures, and many synthetic ones are very pure. Part of the difficulty is that Steve does not define what a chemical is, or know the difference between an element, a compound, and a mixture, or between a rock and a mineral. Except on p173, where Steve appears to understand that the reactive and toxic elements, sodium and chlorine, react to form salt (sodium chloride), which has none of the properties of its precursors. Time after time he tries to scare the reader by implying that the toxicity of the precursors (called intermediates by chemists) somehow makes it into non-toxic products. On p261: "...try reflecting on the fact that one of the world's most lethal chemicals, chlorine, and one of the most reactive chemicals, sodium, have an exalted place...[in] the salt shaker." This, sadly, is more typical. Of course, there is no elemental sodium or chlorine in salt, and the properties of the elements do not persist in salt. And a rock should not be confused with a mineral.
So to repeat grade-school material, all substances are chemical. Dreams and electronic phenomena are not. Substances are either pure or mixtures. The smallest stable units of matter in substances are molecules. In an element, all the atoms in all the molecules are the same, except for isotopes, which still have the same chemical properties. In a compound, meaning that 2 or more elements are present in the molecule, all the molecules are alike. Sugar (sucrose) is a compound formed from a glucose and a fructose with loss of water; it is not a mixture of glucose and fructose as Steve claims (p71). A rock is a mixture of minerals. Granite is a mixture of the minerals quartz, mica and feldspar, and most minerals are well-defined compounds. Eating refined salt or calcium sulfate is not the same as eating rock. Steve wrote that the toxic and flammable element phosphorus is part of the Twinkies recipe (p154). This is nonsense. Steve never learned from a chemist to write: "phosphorus compounds, phosphates, are part of the Twinkies recipe"; no, he has to scare us and give chemicals in general a bad name on almost every page.
Steve wrote: "Ferrous sulfate is light gray with a bluish tinge, just as you'd expect an iron derivative to look" (p42). Pure iron(II) sulfate is actually pale green, just as I would expect it to look.
Steve wrote: "Despite being a mere mineral, calcium is really a so-called earth metal, like sodium...(p232). Calcium is not a mineral, because it is never found as the free element. Steve meant gypsum (calcium sulfate), I think. Calcium belongs to the family of elements called alkaline earths and sodium is in the family of alkali metals.
Whenever Steve has trouble with the chemistry of a food additive, his writing becomes very terse and flawed. From p250: "A reaction of benzene with nitric acid, itself a product of hydrogen (usually from natural gas) and nitrogen (usually from liquid air) that have been passed over over a thin platinum wire mesh, makes nitrobenzene and leads to the all-important aniline, a colorless oily liquid with a strong, pleasant odor that happens to be highly poisonous." When this is untangled, we find: (1) the reaction of hydrogen and nitrogen over a heated catalyst of iron oxide and potassium aluminate at 400 atm leads to ammonia, not nitric acid; (2) ammonia and air are heated to 650° and passed over a platinum/rhodium catalyst to make nitric acid, not nitrobenzene; (3) benzene and nitric acid with considerable sulfuric acid yields nitrobenzene; (4) nitrobenzene with iron powder or hydrogenation over nickel gives aniline; and (5) aniline does not have a pleasant odor in my nose. None of this makes much sense to a non-chemist without pictures of the molecules involved, which are sorely lacking. All the reactions are over 100 years old, so industrial secrecy should not have been an issue.
Steve fell for the myth that eating saturated fat causes hardening of the arteries (p181). See "The Cholesterol Myths" by Uffe Ravnskov, 2000; and "The Modern Nutritional Diseases" by Ottoboni.
A list of another 50 errors are available by e-mailing: kauffman@bee.net.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My Mother Warned Me About Eating These Products, But Would I Listen?, May 19, 2007
This review is from: Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats (Hardcover)
My wife has worked for years as a safety manager in the food industry, so I didn't expect too many surprises when I read this book. After all, I had been hearing about some of these products for about 15 years, in one fashion or another. And it didn't come as a shock that what is in snack cakes is also found in chips and cereal, as much of highly processed food is similar in content; it's just the arrangement that changes.
Maybe I took these materials for granted, as I have seen them in their finished state in boxes which the companies were getting ready to use. Somehow a material that is labeled "... Company Concentrated Chip Spice (Sour Cream & Onion)" just does not seem as intimidating as the chemicals presented in this book.
I was disgusted by the manufacturing technique of many of the chemicals, but realize that the science of chemistry is taking one molecule and making it into an entirely different molecule in the quickest and cheapest method possible. As long as the hazardous reactants are removed, I'm not really that terrified by eating most of these compounds, although I'm not that thrilled, either.
I can't wait to show my daughter this book, as she insists that canned spray cheese is really cheese, even though I keep telling her it is cheese food product. Reading this book will make her realize the difference between cheese food product and real cheese!
I did find the book fascinating and easy to read. The author did a wonderful job of blending the material with its source, its manufacture and then with its need within the recipe for the finished product. It was somewhat like reading a travelogue, a cookbook and a chemistry book rolled into one. Although the chemistry is fairly complex, the author does a wonderful job of digesting it into terms that even a chemistry dummy like me can understand and enjoy.
While I will look at a lot of foods differently, this book won't change what I eat. It will change my ability to understand and appreciate just what went into the finished product. I would highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in what they eat, in chemistry or in cooking. It is incredibly well written and will certainly make you think about what you are eating and the cost associated with our love of junk food.
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