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Twinkie, Deconstructed | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Hudson Street Press
Category: EBooks
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $5.99
You Save: $17.96 (75%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 8364
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.308
ASIN: B000OZ0NZS
Publication Date: March 29, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
A pop-science journey into the surprising ingredients found in dozens of common packaged foods, using the Twinkie label as a guide Like most Americans, Steve Ettlinger eats processed foods. And, like most consumers, he often reads the ingredients label???without a clue as to what most of it means. So when his young daughter asked, ???Daddy, what???s polysorbate 60???? he was at a loss???and determined to find out. From the phosphate mines in Idaho to the corn fields in Iowa, from gypsum mines in Oklahoma to the vanilla harvest in Madagascar, Twinkie, Deconstructed is a fascinating, thoroughly researched romp of a narrative that demystifies some of the most common processed food ingredients???where they come from, how they are made, how they are used???and why. Beginning at the source (hint: they???re often more closely linked to rock and petroleum than any of the four food groups), we follow each Twinkie ingredient through the process of being crushed, baked, fermented, refined, and/or reacted into a totally unrecognizable goo or powder with a strange name???all for the sake of creating a simple snack cake. An insightful exploration into the food industry, if you???ve ever wondered what you???re eating when you consume foods containing mono- and diglycerides or calcium sulfate (the latter, a food-grade equivalent) this book is for you.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
great book September 1, 2008
Great source of info on processed foods. It should be a class requirement in grade school health class. People might eat better if they knew what they were really eating.
 Tiring August 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the sort of book I would normally enjoy. Filled with arcane details and delightful trivia, the odysseys of the huge number of products that come together to make Twinkies should be a fun read. But it wasn't.
Part of the problem is that he is not a good writer. There are many of those "Well, that's not the right word there" moments, where he has chosen a word or syntax that made me stop and note the writing (in a negative way) rather than the tale. One example. On page 48 he describes Marmite, a goop I'm quite familiar with. He describes it as "tasting like a salty, bitter, awful form of molasses." The texture is not at all like molasses. Nor the flavor. The color sort of is; it is, after all, brown, but the word "awful" really makes this already weak and unhelpful description sound as if written by a 10 year old. One example among many I could choose.
Then there are the endlessly unfunny asides. If we were casually chatting on an airplane, I might find his little jokes amusing. (Though I doubt it.) But the snide and unwitty remarks of the "this is also used in the manufacture of anti-freeze" variety make this a loser. Am I supposed to be afraid? Worried? Amused? Or just what?
He repeatedly uses terms without defining them (e.g., crumb) but with other terms repeats the definition. A glossary might have been nice.
Ultimately, there is nothing much here. Endless tales of huge tanks and vats and train cars and spinning things and precipitating liquids and complex processes (many of which he is not allowed to see) all blur together. Do I really need to read how each one is made? All these less than 2% chemicals that are swirled together in a process he never sees? Maybe someone cares, but I did not. I bought this book having never heard of it, based on these delightful reviews, but I was not delighted.
 A Twinkie Was Never This Boring June 30, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I thought this would be enjoyable reading, but the tone of the book thoughout was so about not offending anyone. I mean, 50% of our food--whole and processed--is genetically modified, created by a chemical company responsible for Roundup, Agent Orange, postcancer drugs, etc., and that's OK with Steve? All that gets is a little footnote at the bottom of the page? And I wanted to know if stearic acid and sodium stearylate or however you spell it is animal-byproduct-derived, but there was no mention of anything about that--just vague mentionings throughout about "emulsifiers" and whatnot. This book serves no purpose. Hated it.
More subtle and subversive a book than it first seems June 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
Deconstructed? Yes. Analyzed and understood? Nah. June 2, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
So I'm at the bookstore, and I noticed this bright orange book on a rack, with a large Twinkie on the cover. Twinkies? I'm fascinated by Twinkies, and have been 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. So I bought it and took it home and read it, even though I knew nothing about the author, because I like surprises in books. And I got one. It seems after reading this that 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!" 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, the wondrousness 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. Whenever he visited one of these plants, he was not 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.
I suppose you could, as some of my fellow reviewers did, see the book as raising questions and provoking thought. But how much of a question needs to be raised here? How much thought do we need to put into these things? 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. It amazed me that someone could find out so many terrible things and think so little of it.
Then again, I guess it was like a little slice of America.
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