Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats [Paperback]

Anyone who's ever eaten a Twinkie remembers the experience, even if it's been years. The textured, firm, sweet dough combined with the intense vanilla creme (not cream, mind you) filling is distinctive and, especially when you're a kid, delicious, yet obviously somehow sinful and wrong and unnatural at the same time.

Twinkie, Deconstructed is a perfect "sick day in bed" book: a sort of "science lite" non-fiction tome that's fascinating, informative, and non-polemical while still making a political point. I finished it in a little over a day while in the hospital.

The concept is brilliant. Prompted by a question from one of his kids, Ettlinger, a long-time science and consumer products writer, tells a story of traveling around the world to find out where each of the dozens of ingredients in a Hostess Twinkie comes from--in the order in which they're listed on the package. In doing so, he visits a lot more factories than farms, and encounters many more industrial centrifuges than ploughs.

Some reviewers think that Ettlinger got co-opted into the "Twinkie-Industrial Complex" (as he calls it) during the writing of the book. They think that he is too accepting, too uncritical, and indeed too friendly to the various large corporate interests who show him (or, in many cases, refuse to show him) around their facilities and processes. But I think he's smarter and more subversive than that.

Here's something from page 195:

"In an undisclosed location, perhaps in an industrial park near Chicago, maybe in rural, central Pennsylvania, possibly in riparian Delaware, in a plant full of tanks, railroad sidings, and a maze of pipes and catwalks, big, stainless steel vats are filled with fresh, hot, luscious, liquefied sorbitan monostearate."

Or check out this label-text Kremlinology from page 255:

"...while it seems that not one natural color is use in Twinkies, sometime the label has said 'color added,' which would make me suspect that annato, the butter and cheese colorant that is popular with [Hostess's] competitors, is indeed in the mix. But their punctuation indicates otherwise. 'Color added' is followed by '(yellow 5 red 40)' which would seem to indicate grammatically that they are the only colors involved."

One of the most obvious stylistic effects throughout the book is that whenever Ettlinger first mentions a trademarked product, he adds the registered trademark symbol: Yoo-hoo(R) Chocolate Drink, PAM(R) cooking spray, Clabber Girl(R), Davis(R), and Calumet(R) baking soda, and so on. Normally you'd only see things written that way in a press release or corporate brochure.

You might think he was simply pressured by company lawyers, but when I read the book every trademark symbol seemed to me like a wink from the author, an unavoidable reminder that while he's breezing along in his personal, gee-whiz style, he hasn't forgotten that the process of Twinkie-making is huge and industrial, one that has only a little to do with baking and nourishment, and a lot with multinational chemical firms and drill rigs and mines and massive tract farms.

Twinkie, Deconstructed is no Silent Spring, or even Super Size Me. It's neither a manifesto nor a satire. It's not horrified at what Twinkies are made of--because ingredients originating from petroleum or minerals rather than food plants or animals is part of the Twinkie legend. What's surprising is only how far some of those ingredients have to travel, and how extensively they have to be mangled, reprocessed, ground, dissolved, flung, and dried before they get used in even minute quantities to bake those little cakes.

Ettlinger's book is, I think, more effective because he doesn't politicize it overtly. He simply tells us, repeatedly and relentlessly, about conveyor belts, pipes, pressure vessels, railroad cars, noxious chemical reactions, huge stainless steel tanks, monstrous earth-moving equipment, and what obviously must be enormous quantities of energy used in all those processes. He talks just as blithely about factories that refuse to tell him where their ingredients come from at all as he does friendly chemical engineers who show him around less secretive facilities. You can draw your own conclusions.

I did find myself wishing, at the end, that he had calculated how much energy a single Twinkie consumes in its manufacture--how much oil or coal or gas, or how many kilowatt-hours of electricity, it takes to bring all those ingredients together. And I was surprised that, after nearly 300 pages of background, Ettlinger never actually describes step-by-step how a Twinkie is made at the Hostess bakery.

But Twinkie, Deconstructed is a fun read. Whether you feel safe eating a Twinkie afterwards is a message you can safely infer from the book, rather than having to be clubbed over the head with it.

Everyday we eat a gazillion processed food, and yet, who can pronounce all those fancy name on the ingredient list, let alone explain where they come from?

What's polysorbate 60, anyway?

In this book, Ettlinger took one of the most quintessential North American snacks, the Twinkie, and, well, deconstructed it. Ingredient by ingredient. Including water (yes, there's a chapter on water!)

By reading this book, you won't become completely grossed out by processed food, nor will you feel you need to start a revolution and go back to growing your own stuff in your backyard, wheat, pig, and all. But you will know what you're eating. Some are good, some are bad, and some are middle ground. By like Ettlinger says in his final chapters, which nicely puts everything back into perspective, "reduced to the absurd: should the ingredient H2O scare us because it is often found mixed in with acids and poisons? [...] Isn't moving molecules around what you do when you fry an egg or bake a cake or even boil water?" (p. 261)

Of course, processed food ARE chemicals. And processed food will not always have all the nutriments you would find in natural food, yet alone be as healthy calorie/fat/everything wise. But once in awhile, it can be satisfying - and the processed food additives HAVE been tested and used for ages without "killing" anyone... who eats them as a treat once in awhile.

So if you like to know what you put in your mouth, then go ahead and read this book - it’s actually pretty entertaining regardless of the all technical stuff it covers. You'll then be able to read an ingredient list and actually make more of a sense of what you see, as well as make slightly more informed choices when you buy your inevitable processed food. My only drawback with the book: a paragraph (or two) on the actual nutritional impact of the ingredients would have been nice. But at 263 pages, it already covers a lot, and if anything, it just gives you the motivation to dig deeper... now that you have a background into the subject, enough to guide any additional research, even if amateur!

And like Ettlinger said, "At least now you know what you're eating". (p. 263)

Theoretically this is about the ingredients in the Twinkie, the quintessential American snack food (we don't have them in Canada but we do have Hostess Cupcakes, which according to the author are an even bigger seller). In actuality it's more about the chemicals and processing in today's packaged foods, and as he points out, there are whole multi-million dollar industries that exist just to make, for example, food grade cellulose that would never be found in a home kitchen. The book gives more than just facts. Rather tongue-in-cheek, he points out the excess intrinsic in today's food culture, and as he often says, it's amazing how much business is based on making prepared food taste good, and making it last on a store shelf.

It's an easy read, and truly is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about what we are feeding our children, and ourselves, these days.