Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats - 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 [...]
Being a working college student is not an easy task, time is short, the workload is tall, and the demands are plentiful. It seems as if every minute is valuable and one cannot afford to waste even 1 precious hour. Time must be organized to ensure that homework is completed, tests are studied for, and work commitments are met. In the middle of this whole mess is the need to provide the body with nourishment so that it may have the energy to make it through the daily grind.When time is tight many find themselves seeking out "easy" snacks, foods that simply taste good and go down without any effort. A twinkie is a great example of one of these "quick and tasty" treats. During a moment of hunger nothing tastes better than a twinkie, full of nothing but sweet, sweet sugar. The harsh consequence
We’re sick here at Chez Twinkie. We were supposed to go to a Halloween/Samhaim party Sunday and I opted out a few days before because both kids had become snot factories. Although I had to admire their productivity the product was a little yucky and I doubted anyone else wanted to share in it.
Sunday morning I started to wonder if I had been a little overzealous in canceling our fun afternoon. Carmel apples! Leaf jumping! A chance to wear my medieval peasant costume! After multiple nights of lousy sleep both kids had slept well and woke up in pleasant moods. After multiple days of suppressed appetites both kids ate a substantial breakfast. (Here I will briefly digress and offer up yet another thank you to the patron saint of breast-feeding, inexplicably a man, for helping to ensure that even when the kids don’t want to eat solids that they are still getting nutrition.) The mucus output seemed to have slowed Even napping went well. Clearly, I was overzealous. I f
Have you ever heard of the term work hot? That's when somebody looks really attractive at work only because the options are so sorely lacking, thus making them the hottest person at work. This is typically the most fertile ground for an office romance to grow. I strongly advise against it under any circumstance. I offer you my list of...
Could it be that our health conscious lifestyles may actually force Twinkies to go out of business? Gosh, I hope not. I have to say I probably haven't bought any in over 10 years, but just the idea of a world without Twinkies bothers me. This article may have scared me into the middle shelf of the snack aisle more regularly than every decade.It turns out that it's not only because of health concerns that Twinkies are in jeopardy. There are apparently union issues to be worked out. I think the workers should just be given a case of Twinkies a day (in addition to a fair wage and decent health benefits, of course) and everyone will be happy.Let's hope for a peaceful world, where Twinkies can coexist with healthy lifestyles, union workers and shareholders alike!
Walk with me...I've been an anti-Twinkies advocate my whole life. The mere sight of the oily yellow cake clinging desperately to the inside of it's cellophane wrapper was enough to ruin my appetite for hours. I was sure there could be no worse junk food and that my guts would instantly turn into liquefied sewage one ever touched my lips.I was wrong. Allow me to shed some light on this often misunderstood snack.On April 6, 1930, at a Hostess' Schiller Park, IL bakery, Jimmy Dewar was trying to find an alternate use for the lady-fingers pans that filled the shelves. Strawberry lady fingers were a seasonal specialty and the pans went unused most of the year so Dewar thought up a cheap, enticing treat for the off season. A little sponge cake batter, a little filling and the Twinkie was born.It was the height of the Depression and Dewar sold the baked goods for 5 cents in packs of two. An ad campaign for Twinkle Toe Shoes caught Dewar's attention and he named the paired cakes after
Another one of the cake/cookie sushi versions. I am not that into cakes. Really! I think that proper sushi is a lot better for you, but I am a sucker for silly things like this. Hostess Food is always looking for new and fun recipes for their products. Here it is the Twinkie that ends up being served as sushi!
Items Needed:
3 Hostess Twinkies
Assorted dried fruits
Assorted fruity candies
2 green fruit roll ups
Dried mangoes (looks like pickled ginger)
(more…)
RECIPE INGREDIENTS1 (9 x 13) inch chocolate cake5 tbsp. flour1 c. milk1 c. sugar1/2 tsp. salt1/2 c. vegetable shortening1 tsp. vanillaRECIPE METHODBake cake and cool. Mix flour and milk. Cook over low heat until thick, remove from heat and cool. Place shortening, butter, salt and vanilla in mixing bowl and mix. Add cooled flour and milk mixture and beat at high speed until filling is like whipped cream. Cut cooled cake in half lengthwise and put on filling. Place top back on and frost with favorite icing.
The next time you pick up a Twinkie, consider this: out of the laundry list of, often unpronounceable, ingredients, eight come from domestic corn, three from soybeans and others from Chinese refineries and Chinese factories. More specifically, some of the ingredients, such as thiamine mononitrate, come from Chinese petroleum.Disturbing? Yes. But perhaps even more so is the fact that the LA Times author of this article said Twinkies contain “other unexpected ingredients that are much harder to trace.” Ingredients coming from American food additive "manufacturers" who buy their chemicals from distributors without asking where they came from. The distributors are guilty, too, because they buy from importers, who buy from exporters, who also do not identify their real sources.Of course, Twinkies are not the only food (if you can call them that) on your grocery store shelves that contain a sampling of strange chemicals from around the world. Most all processed foods, from salad dressing
The statistics for celiac disease are now accepted to be approximately 1 in 100 people are affected BUT more than 90% are unaware or undiagnosed. How do you help a huge segment of humanity affected by food sensitivity and allergy when they don’t even know they are at risk for these conditions? How can you help the masses who are blindly trusting reassurances that are food supply is safe or that genetically modified foods are without risk? They have to hear the information. To hear, you have to break through their filters and enter in areas where they explore their environment. In our culture, at this time, that means the Internet and television but the latter is focused on the trend of reality TV.I was invited to audition for this new reality show based on my work on the Internet. My amateur video was submitted on YouTube where people are asked to vote for top contestants to compete for opportunity to work with a group of legendary Internet gurus. My video audition for the Next Inte
Is the non-decaying Twinkie story an urban legend? Well, this Twinkie is officially two months old today. Apart from being very hard, it looks the same to me as it did when I removed it and it’s sibling from the package on March 14, 2007. The twin suffered a fatal drop from my six year-old son’s hands a couple of weeks ago. It was soggy from being placed in a zip lock bag and had been in the dark loset, only being brought out for photos. My son picked it up to look for mold (he found none) when the accident occurred. We continued with the surviving Twinkie dry and in the light. No mold or signs of decay on this Twinkie now at two months prompts me to ask if anyone really believes that a food that shows no sign of deterioration after this long is really safe to eat. The makers of Twinkies already concede they aren’t healthy but they taste good. One of my friends in medical residency, Dr. Bruce Caldwell, affectionately called fast food “garbage food”. He or someone else in my
"For example, 14 of the most common chemicals we use are found in Twinkies. I mention the Twinkie-Industrial Complex. It's tied in with major industries that are also often tied with government policy. This isn't mere food," he says. "This is industry."
Wheat gluten has been suspected as a possible cause of the recent epidemic of kidney failure and death of dogs and cats from pet food. I will highlight just two of numerous publications dating to the early 1900’s published on wheat gluten toxicity in cattle and dogs. A 1948 American Journal of Physiology article documents experiments trying to prevent seizures in dogs fed wheat gluten. This research was prompted by a twenty-five year history of theories about the cause of a condition called “canine hysteria” or “running fits”. Death, blindness, seizures and ataxic neurological symptoms are described in dogs fed meal made with wheat gluten. The symptoms are eerily similar to what have been described recenlty in dogs and cats eating pet food containing wheat gluten. Many of the symptoms are also identical to those experienced by humans with untreated celiac disease and gluten sensitivity. Dating back to the early 1900’s adverse health were known to occur from the nutritional
Recently, our daughter’s teacher told us the story of her son's initially failed science project. After a week of no mold on moist sandwich bread left out in a cool dark closet they had to use gluten-free bread to get the experiment to work. This came as no surprise to my wife and I since in our gluten-free household we routinely freeze any gluten-free baked goods that we don’t expect to eat within a couple of days to avoid wasting the food due to mold.My first opportunity to try my own experiment was a few weeks ago when I asked one our houseguests to leave a slice of the regular bread we had bought for them on a paper plate as an experiment. After about five days of only crumbling bread without mold was exposing our household to unwanted gluten, my wife, who has Celiac disease, threw it out. Remembering an urban legend about 30-year old Twinkies, I did some research. I found a quote from Dr. Steven Masley describing foods containing trans fats being like "embalming fluid" and h
This is the Chemical Engineer in me. Curiously enough, one of the most interesting classes I took in college was Food Chemistry.
Twinkie Deconstructed, by Steve Ettlinger
description from Barnes & Noble:
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,
