Deconstructing a Twinkie

A man reverse engineered a Twinkie and wrote a book about it. He must have been terribly bored.

Actually, it’s not reverse engineering when it comes to analyzing the exact ingredients in a food product. Deconstructing is the better term which is why Steve Ettlinger called his book, Twinkie, Deconstructed.

It all began when Steve Ettlinger’s daughter asked, “Daddy, what’s polysorbate 60?” while eating ice cream at the beach on a hot summer day. He was at a loss but was determined to find out.

This lead to a pop-science journey into the surprising ingredients found in dozens of common packaged foods, using the Twinkie label as a guide

The book contains some disturbing revelations. "It can be unsettling to learn just how closely the basic ingredients in processed foods resemble industrial materials," a reviewer of the book writes. "Corn dextrin, a common thickener, is also the glue on postage stamps and envelopes. Ferrous sulfate, the iron supplement in enriched flour and vitamin pills, is used as a disinfectant and weedkiller."

In his book, Steve Ettlinger explains the processes:

… by which raw materials are crushed, baked, fermented, refined and/or reacted into a totally unrecgoizable goo or powder with a strange name thich then appears on a label full of other incomprehensible and barley pronounceable ingredients.

Makes you want to rush right out and buy a 10-pack of Twinkies.

Hostess, which refused to cooperate with the book, says it bakes 500 million Twinkies a year.

Twinkies have been attacked by health conscious people for years but that doesn’t slow down the production of Twinkies. Hostess sells more and more of them each year.

Will this book slow down Twinkie sales? Probably not.

Will I stop eating Twinkies? Probably not.

I must say, Hostess made the chemicals in Twinkies really quite tasty.

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