Editorial Review:Product Description:A pop-science journey into the surprising ingredients found in most common packaged foods Like most Americans, Steve Ettlinger eats processed foods. And, like most consumers, he didn’t have a clue as to what most of the ingredients on the labels mean. 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 oil fields in China,
Twinkie, Deconstructed 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—all for the sake of creating a simple snack cake.
An insightful exploration of the modern 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 of plaster of paris), this book is for you.
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Waste of paper
As a farmer, economist, and generally well informed person, I found this book to be lacking. Overly sensational and sometimes outright wrong, the facts asserted in this book are in fact not. There is a list on the internet of the errors in the book, too long to post it here.
I was given the book by an internationally known food scientist and chef who knew that I would get a good laugh out of it. Sadly, many in the public will be misled by this book.
b
Rating: -
great book
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.
Rating: 
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Tiring
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.
Rating: -
A Twinkie Was Never This Boring
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.
Rating: -
More subtle and subversive a book than it first seems
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.