Twinkie, Deconstructed: Processing the American Diet

Steve Ettlinger, author of a new book called Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients in Processed Foods are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats. But he did nothing about it until his daughter asked him what polysorbate 60 was.

In his book, Ettlinger leads us through every step needed to manufacture a Twinkie. Ettlinger describes mines and mile-long factories and reveals the enormous industrial effort that goes into making a Twinkie, although the book can be generalized to include all processed foods....

(Excerpts from an Interview with Steve Ettlinger->

Ettlinger: Our way of life might say we want something that can be wrapped in plastic and not lose flavor. Our way of life might say we want little servings of foods packaged separately; we don't want to have to cut something. ...

I wanted to go back to the ground. I wanted to see where each ingredient came from the ground because that appeals to me. I like connecting the dots and making it complete from start to finish. ...

For example, the carbon dioxide that is pumped into these sodium carbonates to turn it into sodium bicarbonate comes from a nearby coal mine; that was interesting to me. And I actually talked to the people who dig the whole in the ground and truck the carbon dioxide over to the plant I visited in Green River, Wyo. For me, it's great satisfaction to get to the bottom of things and to see precisely where they come from....

So, I know that certain foods are linked to certain places. What's appealing to me about Twinkie, Deconstructed is that processed foods, by their very definition, are not linked to any place. They're anti-linked, they're meant to be producible everywhere and always the same.

...One of my sources sent me a sample of polysorbate 60, a large quart container of this light brown goo, and I asked, "Can I taste it?" He said, "You wouldn't want to; you won't be able to taste your dinner for a week." That kind of scared me. No one else sent me a sample and said, "Don't taste it."

...I think mankind is driven to always improve on nature or try to control it. In this case the motivation comes from mankind's desire to preserve food, which goes back thousands of years to smoking and salting. And what the food chemists who have created a cake with a long shelf life have done is sort of in the tradition of salting your fish or smoking your pork so it will last...

Well we're part of an international complex -- the Twinkie Industrial Complex. We're eating things made with colors from Chinese petroleum and flavors made from Middle Eastern petroleum and vitamins made from all kinds of things in China and India, and so forth. And it is reassuring to me to eat something made from whole wheat, without all those ingredients. It's reassuring to me to eat locally grown food -- I get a kick out of that...

So, in my mind, I let the reader decide based on the facts that I give them if they want to eat food processed with toxic chemicals made in factories that are a mile long. I don't, but ... this book isn't about me, it's about, "What is this stuff? Where does it come from?" It's the pure unadulterated pleasure of knowing where your food comes from so you can make an informed choice.