The Explosive Truth About Twinkies, The Industrial-Strength Snack Cake

There are simple carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, and then there's the Twinkie, made from military industrial-complex carbohydrates. It's got some of the same ingredients as tracer bullets and artillery shells, as I learned from reading Steve Ettlinger's Twinkie, Deconstructed.

Ettlinger's book, just out in paperback, documents the 39 ingredients it now takes to make a Twinkie, many of them minerals and chemicals, some derived from crude oil. This petroleum-based pastry is about a million food miles removed from your grandma's yellow sponge cake, which had a shelf life of maybe two days, max.

Today's Twinkie, on the other hand, stays frighteningly "fresh" for an unnaturally long time (officially, 25 days, but we all know it's really more like 25 months.) Real butter turns rancid too fast, so the Twinkie gets its butter-like taste and texture from petrochemical-based ingredients like diacetyl, a close cousin to acetylene welding gas, and butyric acid, a flavor which Ettlinger gleefully informs us is "a natural component of Parmesan cheese, rancid butter, and, unbelievably, vomit and perspiration."

Twinkie, Deconstructed may amaze and appall you, but the fact is that while a Twinkie is not particularly good for you, it's not all that bad for you, either. It's just an amalgam of industrial ingredients and artificial flavors posing as an actual pastry. How did we ever fall for this oily oblong cake with the mystery "cream" filling?

Take a trip down Madison Avenue's memory lane via YouTube with the classic '70s Twinkie ad at the top of this post and you'll find out. Watch the housewife-on-a-budget vow that no matter how tight money gets, she'll never deprive her kids of "fresh, wholesome" Hostess Twinkies, because "you can't skimp when it comes to your children."

Fast forward to this series of Flickr photos taken last month entitled "It's What's For Breakfast," in which a visibly disgusted mom in Portland, Oregon documented five days of the hot "food" served free to kids at her local public school in the morning before school. Stuff like "Bagel-ers," which are some kind of bagel and cream cheese concoction, and a pancake-sausage-breakfast-sandwich that "tastes like sugar," and a cereal bar made of whole grain oats glued together by "corn syrup, sugar, high fructose corn syrup. . . followed by a long list of other ingredients most of them with names only a chemist would understand."

Or Steve Ettlinger. Twinkie, Deconstructed is not a Fast Food Nation/Omnivore's Dilemma-style indictment of our food chain; it's a science writer's agenda-free foray into the peculiar world of processed foods, an odyssey Ettlinger embarked on in response to his daughter's innocent question, "Daddy, what's polysorbate 60?"

After reading Twinkie, Deconstructed I have a better understanding of what goes into the "cakelike cylinders (with creamlike fillings) called Twinkies that never grow stale," as Michael Pollan describes them in In Defense of Food.

What I don't understand is why our agricultural policies continue to promote these "edible foodlike substances" (Pollan's words, again.) It's bad enough that your tax dollars are paying for all those amber waves of grain that get turned into nutritionally bankrupt foods and environmentally disastrous biofuels. But did you know that the USDA actually penalizes commodity crop growers who want to replant their fields with fruits or vegetables?

I didn't, until I read Jack Hedin's op-ed in last Saturday's New York Times. Hedin, a small organic vegetable farmer in southern Minnesota, reveals that, at a time when farmers' markets are popping up all over the country to meet the growing demand for fresh local produce, the USDA is working "deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding." Why in the world would they want to do that? Hedin explains:

Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country's fresh produce markets.

The USDA actually fines farmers who have the audacity to switch from growing commodity grains to, say, melons or tomatoes, as Hedin learned the hard way. Talk about passive/aggressive. The USDA's telling us we've got to eat more fruits and vegetables even as it's thwarting the efforts of small family farmers to help us do just that.

At a time when Michael Pollan and those Skinny Bitches are convincing this nation of meatheads that a plant-based diet is better for us -- not to mention our fellow creatures and the planet -- our government is in cahoots with Agribiz and Big Food to keep us hooked on a chemical plant-based diet. And that's a shame, because the epidemic of diseases caused by our Western diet poses a far greater threat to mankind than Middle Eastern terrorists

Joe Wilson went off to Niger in search of "yellow cake" and came up famously empty-handed in the fiasco we've come to know as "PlameGate." Little did he know we've got a yellow cake-based weapon of mass destruction right here at home.

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

Comments

[MajorKong]

I'm pretty leery of any baked good that has a more or less indefinite shelf life.

[lungfish]

I am reminded of a Simpson's episode in which a customer at the Quickee Mart throws a twin pack of twinkies on the floor and stomps on it.... Apu Nahasapeemapedalan (see I could spell it) picks up the twinkie pack and sez "Silly customer, you can not harm a twinkie."

[YellerDawg]

I never liked them, but I do love those Snowballs, cupcakes, and fruit pies. Mmmm! My three favorite food groups.

[wm1066]

I stopped eating them a long time ago but would occasionally have one. And a funny thing happened, I lost my taste for them , they weren't the treat I expected . They don't taste good anymore. They are kinda yucky.

[lungfish]

I know what you mean...

About a year ago I took the plunge and started living on stir fried vegetables, fruits along with some soybased products. I buy flash frozen stir fry vegie packs so that I don't always have to spend a lot of time prepping though that is enjoyable when I have the time. I live on a coffee farm so I enjoy my java with some Silk soy creamer and raw suger. I grew up on sheep farms and saw plenty of stock converted into meat and never got over my discomfort with it - I knew even at a young age that there was "somebody" inside those animals. You can replace animal protein with vegetable based protein drinks that are better for you and cost about the same as meat...I am very active so I don't skimp in this regard.

The result of this shift is that I am now repelled by pastries, breads, dairy, meat, etc... My body finds the flavors to be abominable and they wreck havoc on my digestion. I couldn't eat a twnkie if my life depended on it. Last Xmas somebody gave me a pumpkin pie so I bought some heavy cream and whipped it. I ate that pie and it was one of the most digusting things I have ever experienced and wont' do it again.

It is clear that we learn to like certain tastes and if we separate from them for a long enough time they are no longer attractive. .... I do eat a bit of chocolate with my coffee on occasion and that is really nice... I lost 60lbs and am lean and happy and glad I did it....

[loril]

Reading this is like tracing the nutritional trajectory of my life. Sure, as a child of the 1970s, I ate my share of Hostess and, with my child palette, I loved it. My personal Hostess faves were HoHos and those fruit pies. I doubt if I could eat one now because of the facts I have internalized about the sketchy ingredients. My preschooler has never had a Hostess product and eats a LOT LESS sugar than I ever did. She does not miss it, either, because it has never been part of her diet.

I definitely moved from the junk food/sugar junkie youth to the nutrition obsessed mom who cooks everything from scratch and won't touch high fructose corn syrup with a ten foot pole.

One of my beefs is with portion allotment. When I was a kid, you could buy single serving Hostess...so my mom would let me buy 1 Twinkie or "fruit" pie. Now, all I see at the grocery store are the big boxes of crap. So, your family is basically roped into eating multiple servings of this stuff instead of stopping at one per person. They also tend to sell those big "cookie bowls" at the store bakeries instead of being able to buy just a few.

I don't want to rob my kid of the simple pleasures of junk food. Some day she might even try a Twinkie. I just hope that her taste for home baked treats makes her less of a fan. It is something she will have to discover on her own, though, because I don't plan on taking a walk down memory lane buy purchasing Twinkies any time soon.

[mandycat]

Several years ago I was browsing around a Web site devoted to decluttering and organizing our homes. The owner of the site asks her readers to share the strangest things they've found while decluttering.

One woman wrote that after her son went off to college, she went into his room for a thorough cleanout. On a top shelf in his closet, she found a lunch box which she knew was from his sixth grade days, since that was when he balked at taking his lunch to school any more.

When she opened the box, she realized that he didn't eat his lunch that last day and he forgot to throw it out. Inside she found an unidentifiable heap of something she guessed was a sandwich. Next to that was an unopened package of Twinkies: sagging a little in the middle but still remarkably perky for a food item that had been sitting unrefrigerated for six years.

She chose not to try a taste test.

[happycat]

Regardless of what's in them, they sure are tasty.

[Ben Dixon]

There are two things that humans should not know, what goes in to the making of suasage and twinkies.

[grisgris]

Humans are hard wired to like the feeling of high fat foods in their mouths. It goes back to nature's way of ensuring we consume enough calories to sustain us and enough fats to keep us warm. Twinkies are poison. They should be subjected to FDA approval like a new drug. They'd probably be outlawed.

[anfractuous]

As I understand it, until it became generally known and then changed, the filing of a twinky was basically lard and sugar. (Or maybe lard just became too expensive.)