Book #23

Twinkie, Deconstructed
by Steve Ettlinger


We finally got to Powell's, and bought several new tasty selections, but as we were heading for the check-out, I noticed this bright orange book on a rack, with a large Twinkie on the cover. Twinkies? I'm fascinated by Twinkies, ever since I put a pair into a jar in 2005, where they sit to this day, stale and hard as rocks but otherwise unspoiled. I looked at the title: Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats. Oh, I like that. I am highly disturbed by the amount of processing that goes into our food. I looked a little closer -- and saw a Discount sticker. Sold.

I finished Furies of Calderon a day or so later, so I grabbed up my most serendipitous find because I like surprises in books. And I got one. Steve Ettlinger, the man who wrote this and several other food books, is not horrified as I am by the chemicals and machinery that process our food, nor is he disgusted by the source of most of the food additives. Oh, no: he finds it fascinating. It was like reading a canned travelogue by a corporate shill as he goes on an ersatz tour of discovery. The majority of the commentary in the book was along the lines of, "Gee, that machine over there, where they're mixing corn with six different toxic chemicals in order to make it look bright orange, is really, really big!" or "Golly, ain't it a wonder that such a delicious food comes from a petrochemical factory in China! If only we in America could eliminate our labor laws, we could make this wondrous product ourselves!" And no, I'm not exaggerating. I took to reading this book in Troy McClure's voice, since it reminded me so much of his Meat Council film on how meat gets from the farm into your stomach. Everything was spun so that it was supposed to depict the miracle of modern industry, of how these massive, shadowy chemical conglomerates manage to make food so easy to make and sell, and so appealing to an unsuspecting public, on such a huge scale. Every time he visited one of these plants, he was never allowed to see the process that goes into making the actual additive, but he was allowed to gawp at the 80-story buildings and the 1000-ton train cars and the 1,000,000-gallon mixing tanks. Every single company he describes, the first thing he talks about is the scale: how big the buildings and machines are, how much material they take in and how much they pump out every day, every year.

The entire thing was disgusting to me. The whole system boils down to this: we eat grains like wheat, soybeans and corn; minerals like salt and soda ash (baking soda), and oil. Lots and lots of oil. I don't know what it is about petrochemicals that make them so handy for the artificial food industry, but the last several chapters of the book (He wrote it in the same order as the list of ingredients on a Twinkie wrapper, which is clever but tends to de-emphasize the most horrid things, which are in there in much smaller proportions that high fructose corn syrup -- though that's really pretty nasty, too.) are all about different ways that oil and natural gas get messed with chemically in order to produce flavorings, dyes, and preservatives. And reading all of this with this author who actually takes the word of the company that all of the toxins are removed after processing and the food is perfectly healthy for human consumption -- it was amazing to watch him swallow that one; it was like watching a boa constrictor eat a Vespa -- gave the whole thing such a surreal aura that it was even more bizarre and uncomfortable to read than it should have been just based on the subject. I haven't eaten Twinkies since I started my jar -- and this book kind of ruined that, too, since I found out that Twinkies really are just baked goods, and any bread/cake (Any processed one, that is) I put into a jar like that would probably just stale, instead of spoiling -- but now I want to stop eating all processed foods, or at least as much as I can. It amazed me that someone could find out so many terrible things and think nothing of it. Then again, I guess it was like a little slice of America.