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 seventies 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?"
