What's in a Twinkie? Kids' favorite food deconstructed

[Kadie]

What's in a Twinkie? Kids' favorite food deconstructed

snip...
What's cellulose gum, sorbic acid, polysorbate 60, sodium caseinate and red 40? Where do these ingredients come from? What do they look and smell like?

Dwight Eschliman, a San Francisco dad and internationally recognized photographer, wanted to answer these questions. And so he took one of America's favorite foods--the Twinkie--and deconstructed it by purchasing each of the 37 ingredients and then photographing them.

While he was able to buy the flour and sugar at a typical grocery store, he went to a chemical supply company to purchase more than half of the ingredients.

"Some of the ingredients came with hazardous materials warnings," he says. "The monoglyceride and diglyceride were so noxious that you couldn't get within a few feet of them without feeling sick. And it turns out that calcium caseinate is used to make plaster of Paris."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?entry_id=72072#ixzz0zBcXH8XM

pics at this link...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/09/10/Twinkie_Ingredients.DTL

[Catshrink]

1. And some science behind Twinkies

(sort of)

Results of tests on density, resistivity, gravitational response, radiation, The Turing Test, rapid oxidation, and solubility.

http://www.twinkiesproject.com/

[DBoon]

7. Turing test?

I'll have to read that.

Were twinkies able to mimic human intelligence?

Could they fool an outside observer into thinking they were actually a tea-bagger?

[Whoa_Nelly]

2. Twinkies of today, and even Hostess Cupcakes

do not taste the same as they did back in the '60s.

[jmowreader]

5. There's a very simple reason for that

Twinkies are no longer allowed to contain coconut oil, saturated fats or Strontium-90. (It was the last that made them taste so good!)

[Whoa_Nelly]

6. I think they used to have more cream filling back then, too

:(

[Lorien]

8. "Allowed"? Coconut oil isn't banned anywhere. In fact, it's sold as a health food

twinkies used to contain more natural ingredients such as eggs, milk and butter-that's what made them taste good (long ago, anyway) http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/twinkie.htm/printable

[jmowreader]

10. More like "not allowed by the manufacturer"

For a very long time, coconut oil was the stuff you wanted to use. The original recipe for Ritz crackers called for coconut oil: it's what glued the salt to the outside of the cracker. And it was the only oil commercial operators wanted to use to cook popcorn in because it's got an extremely high smoke point. Then all this "saturated fat is automatically bad for you" shit came out, and coconut oil became olio non grata because it is pure saturated fat. (There are different kinds of saturated fats, and the ones in coconut oil turned out to be good for you. But that's beside the point--they're still saturated and you can't convince the ill-informed American who is "concerned about her health" of anything--if Mom turned the box of Twinkies over and saw "saturated fat" on the nutrition statement, no kid in America would eat a Twinkie again.)

[Marie Marie]

3. Isn't it common knowledge that Twinkies and Cockroaches

are the only things proven to survive a Nuclear Holocaust? Well, at least the roaches will have something to eat.

[marybourg]

4. And now it's clear that Happy Meals will survive also:

http://www.examiner.com/healthy-food-in-knoxville/year-old-happy-meal-hasn-t-decomposed-photos

[Lorien]

9. Kept this guy alive:

[DailyGrind51]

11. Back in the '60s, they recommended Twinkees to stock in fall-out shelters,

because of their long shelf-life. Yikes!

[carlyhippy]

12. I don't like Twinkies

After I eat them, I get a sore throat for some reason. Probably all those chemicals. I do, however, like those raspberry zinger things, but haven't eaten one of those in years. I would have to buy an entire box, and no one around here is going to eat them but me.

[Heywood J]

13. I wish science would enter the discussion.

For example:

Sodium is a harmful alkali metal that reacts violently or explosively with water to produce a caustic base that will burn flesh. It's a major part of lye, something powerful enough to strip tissue from bones and render a body into a skeleton.

Chlorine is a toxic gas used as a chemical weapon against soldiers and is used industrially to bleach paper. When part of other compounds, it can destroy the ozone layer. When mixed with water, it produces an acid capable of burning through many things.



These things sound horrible until you realize they're part of your body, often given intravenously in the form of saline, and that we couldn't live without them. Something can be quite noxious on its own and require a hazardous material warning, yet not behave this way when part of a final product. Twinkies may not be the most healthy thing for you, but they aren't going to cause your body to dissolve.

[Catshrink]

14. Hey, I tried!

See post #1. Those were controlled studies from Rice University.

[Brickbat]

15. +1.

[FourScore]

16. I don't know a single kid who eats Twinkies.

I got three kids and know lots of parents. Kids today won't touch 'em. They think they're gross. That doesn't mean they don't have their own junk food choices that are just as bad. But Twinkies? I don't think so.

[Godhumor]

17. Read the book "Twinkie Deconstructed"

It is an entertaining look at where the ingredients actually come from and why they're in the food.