- Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
If you consume Twinkies - and you know who you are - consider yourself a teeming glop of petrochemicals culled from all over the country, and some foreign countries, too. You are not the honey-blond, cream-filled spongy little darling of the snack world. You are a global test tube.
Blame author Steve Ettlinger - or more accurately, Ettlinger's young daughter - for shattering any wholesome, flag-and-country illusion you may have enjoyed while partaking of one of America's most hallowed snack foods. One day, while espying her pop reading the ingredient label on an ice cream bar, the precocious tot piped up:
"Where does pol-y-sor-bate-six-tee come from, Daddy?"
Don't kids say the darndest things? But it got Ettlinger, a New Yorker with a New Yorker's all-consuming fascination for food, to thinking. Where does polysorbate 60 come from?
And what is it?
For the purposes of research, Ettlinger set his sights on the iconic Twinkie, which also happens to have a list of additives as long as Bobby Brown's rap sheet. Letting the Twinkie ingredient label be his guide, Ettlinger went on a quest that literally took him around the world.
From phosphate mines in Idaho to oil fields in China, Ettlinger sussed out the origins of the processed ingredients found in the canoe-shaped cakelet. He reveals how each Twinkie ingredient goes through the process of being crushed, baked, fermented, refined and/or reacted into an unrecognizable, often hard-to-pronounce goo or powder.
"Twinkie, Deconstructed" also gives an eye-popping account of the secrecy and near terrorist-high level of security that shrouds the production of this delightful sweet treat. When Ettlinger had the temerity to ask an employee how Twinkies are made, that employee responded with a Mona Lisa smile.
Chemists, nutritionists and other science-minded folk will no doubt get all misty-eyed over the page-by-page slog through chapters with such absorbing titles as "Soy: Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable and/or Animal Shortening, Soy Lecithin, and Soy Protein Isolate." Heck, if they can plow through the book's subtitle, they will be downright giddy at being able to keep their hand in with this pop-science dissection.
Lovers of the Twinkie may begin drooling over the beatifically back-lit snack cake on the cover, but they will not find a humorous, lighthearted romp - much less a sweet, creamy filling - within. And they may not appreciate the plodding manner in which the truth is delivered. Ignorance, like a Twinkie before its expiration date, can be bliss.
- Caroline Dipping
