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.
