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In this delightful romp through the food processing industry, Ettlinger, who writes on consumer products (The Complete Illustrated Guide to Everything Sold in Hardware Stores), says, "Believers of urban legends take note.... Twinkies are not just made of chemicals," nor will their ingredients allow them to last, "even exposed on a roof, for 25 years." But what exactly their ingredients are, and how they come from places like Minnesota and Madagascar to be made into what Ettlinger calls "the uber-iconic food product, the archetype of all processed foods," is the subject of his book. Each chapter looks at individual ingredients, in the same order as on a Twinkie package, so Ettlinger finds himself traveling to eastern Pennsylvania farms to study wheat, as well as to high-security plants that manufacture highly toxic chlorine used in minute amounts to make the bleached flour that is "the only kind that works in sugar-heavy" Twinkies or birthday and wedding cakes. His exploration of the manufacturing processes of cellulose gum ("perfect for lending viscosity to the filling in snack cakes—or rocket fuel"), for example, cleverly reveals how Twinkie ingredients "are produced by or dependent on nearly every basic industry we know." (Mar. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
If you want to explore all the unpronounceable and highly suspect ingredients we consume daily, what better starting point could you choose than that classic golden crème-filled cake reputedly capable of withstanding a nuclear holocaust? In Twinkie, Deconstructed, Steve Ettlinger sets out on just such an exploration, with mixed results.
"Where does pol-y-sor-bate six-tee come from, Daddy?" This is the question that inspires Ettlinger to research every ingredient listed on the back of the Twinkie wrapper, from enriched flour right on down to Yellow Dye No. 5. Having "always wondered what those strange-sounding ingredients were" as he read food labels "purely out of habit" (though not, apparently, out of any concern about what he was pouring down the throats of his innocent progeny), Ettlinger travels to plants, mines and refineries the world over, where he witnesses all manner of centrifuging, sifting and mixing of the flammable petroleum products that eventually make their way into these snack cakes. He also talks to lots of PR guys, who alternately give him the big tour, the runaround and the reassurance that there is absolutely no reason to fear any of the highly processed, sinisterly named ingredients that make a Twinkie's creamless "crème" creamy and its eggless cake crumbly -- even when, as happens time after time, they say they can't really go into how those ingredients get made. And Ettlinger, it seems, believes them.
Twinkie, Deconstructed takes such a rosy view of its subject as to give the reader intellectual whiplash. Ettlinger sees no omen of imminent apocalypse in the fact that the biotechnology corporation Monsanto produces both Roundup® herbicide and Roundup Ready® soybeans, genetically modified to resist Monsanto's own product. Those ®s, by the way, appear on every page of Twinkie, in loving lists of the countless processed foods -- "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter® . . . Lee Iacocca's Olivio® . . . Edy's® Grand Light Rich & Creamy Vanilla" -- that incorporate, say, mono and diglycerides.
Nothing wrong with divergent opinions -- that, plus polysorbate 60, is what makes chocolate and vanilla. "Processed" doesn't equal "toxic" -- enriched flour wiped out pellagra, a once common nutritional deficiency that killed 100,000 Americans in the 20th century alone. But Ettlinger's characterization of partially hydrogenated soybean shortening as a "magnificent culinary achievement" is hard to swallow, as is the argument of high fructose corn syrup producers that portion size, rather than HFCS itself, is responsible for the obesity epidemic. I can't help suspecting that rather than getting some answers from the huge, and hugely opaque, food-processing industry that profoundly affects the way we feed ourselves, Ettlinger settled for drinking the Kool-Aid®.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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