Twinkie, Deconstructed (30 page)

S
AFER THAN
S
ALT

Sorbic acid and its half-sisters, potassium and calcium sorbate, are, inarguably, the most popular preservatives in the world. They are incredibly effective at protecting food against a whole host of evildoers, and manage to do so without killing us in the process. To wit: sorbic acid is less toxic than table salt, so safe that the FDA classifies it as “generally regarded as safe” (GRAS). It is one of the few additives that is legal worldwide.

Bill Riha, Head of Regulatory and Scientific Affairs at Nutrinova, which makes the majority of sorbic acid, says that despite its completely industrial origin, it is a polyunsaturated, fatty acid akin to soy, olive, or corn oil (sorbic is a “free” short-chain fatty acid, close cousin to the long-chain fatty acids such as those found in olive oil). Its structure is so familiar to our bodies that allergic reactions are extremely rare. The body metabolizes it just like any other fatty acid by turning the sorbic acid into carbon dioxide and water. That may be why even the arch-keen watchdog Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) lists it as safe. And despite being produced by modern technology, the idea of a preservative is rooted in history.

T
HE
D
RUID’S
S
TAFF AND
I
TS
U
NRIPE
B
ERRY

Since time immemorial, Old World mythology and folklore led humans to believe that the European Rowan, or mountain ash tree (
Sorbus aucuparia
), with its bright orange berries, was magical. It was said to protect against malevolent beings and ward off evil influences, earning the nickname “Thor’s Helper,” and encouraging voyagers to carry bits of the wood with them for protection against witches. Nowadays, with a little help from oil refineries in Germany and Japan, a synthetic version of a chemical found in those berries protects Twinkies and most other processed foods against malevolent microbes—our modern version of evil influences, at least as far as food is concerned. Sorbic acid takes its name from the mountain ash tree genus,
Sorbus
, which is a big improvement on its real name, trans trans 2, 4-hexadienoic acid.

Back in 1859, German chemist A. W. Hoffman cooked up a batch of oil distilled from the juice of pressed, unripe mountain ash berries and managed to isolate sorbic acid for the first time (along with some sugars, then called sorbin and sorbit, and even some sorbitol). Apparently, the berries manufacture sorbic acid to protect themselves, resulting in some medicinal qualities. Mountain ash berries proper are too astringent to eat, but their fresh juice or tea has been used as a laxative, a cure for sore throats, inflamed tonsils, and hoarseness, perhaps because it is loaded with vitamin C; jam and infusions made from the berries have been popular remedies for a host of other ailments, including diarrhea, indigestion, hemorrhoids, scurvy, and gout. While I found no record of traditional use of the berries as a preservative, I did come across a mention of their use to make wine, which, in light of some of the berries’ above-noted digestive-tract medicinal talents, seems like an astonishingly bad idea.

Rowan branches have often been the choice for dowsing rods and magic wands, as well as Native American bows and arrows. Better than that, though, between its reputation for protection and its natural density, the wood has long been a common material for shafts of all kinds, including walking sticks and druids’ staffs.

Only with the advent of the petrochemical industry around 1900 was sorbic acid first synthesized. Still, despite the natural evidence, no one determined for sure its antimicrobial qualities until 1939, when, coincidently, two different scientists—one in Germany and one in the United States—discovered them simultaneously. It was bad timing for the Germans, so Americans naturally took the lead, even netting a patent in 1945. We don’t make it in the United States anymore—like so much of our chemical production, it is now solely manufactured abroad. The world’s largest producer, Nutrinova, née Hoechst AG, is based in Germany, in an ironic twist of history, though presently it is owned by the giant American global chemical conglomerate Celanese.

L
ET
Y
OUR
K
IDS
E
AT
C
AKE

It just doesn’t seem like sorbic acid is something we should strive to feed our children, and as far as I can tell, there’s no home equivalent, either. However, in a nice bit of synergy, it turns out that the reason I don’t need a preservative in cakes I make at home is precisely
because
of my kids: they eat them before they can spoil. So kids really do fill a practical function, after all. The proof: about a week after I took some plastic-wrapped, homemade sponge cake to my office, it was green with mold. Moral: keep your cake at home where it can be appreciated. Or use sorbic acid.

Humankind has been preserving food since the start of civilization. Cooking, drying, salting, and smoking were the only options for thousands of years, with fermentation (technically, lactic acid fermentation) added to the mix awhile ago—think cheese and yogurt. We’ve preserved food over the ages by soaking things in sugar ( jam), vinegar (pickles), or alcohol (fruit). But it wasn’t until the industrial revolution of the 1800s that we came close to the modern options we have today.

Sorbic acid works in a tremendously complex manner that is not fully understood: essentially, though, we know that a whole bunch of different enzymes work together to stop bacteria and fungus growth (it’s classified as a “wide-spectrum antimicrobial”). Try as the bakers might to make snack cakes without water, it’s necessary, especially in the filling. With moisture comes the risk of mold ( just think of your bathtub), and sorbic acid does the job of preventing it beautifully in a variety of products, including cosmetics and topical ointments. The only thing sorbic acid
does
in a Twinkie is preserve; manufacturers who add the phrase “to preserve freshness” or “as a preservative” to their labels are within the law but could save themselves the space on the ingredient label.

At typical usage levels, you can’t smell or taste sorbic acid, even in bland foods, despite its having a slight acid taste and sour odor in concentrated form. Plus, it is strong stuff, used only to the tune of two-tenths of 1 percent of a batch of dough, making an expensive ingredient economical (sometimes it is only 0.03 percent of the food). That’s barely three ounces per hundred pounds, a mere dusting. Sorbic acid is, in fact, the stealth additive, true to its mysterious origins.

From berries to bakeries, via refineries. So safe and strong, the next-to-last item on the ingredient list, so little of it is needed. The only ingredients that there are less of in a Twinkie are colors, and they, too, are totally man-made.

CHAPTER 25

FD&C Yellow No. 5, Red No. 40

T
he last ingredient I explore on my journey is in St. Louis, Missouri, home of the world’s largest food color factory: colors are the last item on many ingredient lists, including Twinkies’. A one-ton, Volkswagen-size supersack of powdered, gray acid sits near another supersack of powdered gray salt, both looking as plain and innocuous as can be. A worker mixes some of each into a 5,500-gallon stainless steel vessel called a coupling tank, a name that reflects its odd job of marrying various molecules with new bonds. He adds some clear water, some brown liquid (sodium nitrite—the salt of nitric acid) as a catalyst, and a little sodium hydroxide (lye) to neutralize the acids, and voilà! Red No. 40. Candy-apple red, with a nice pink foam, a tanker truckload of color that is completely without taste or smell.

A few yards away sit two more supersacks containing the same salt and a similar but unnamed powder. They are mixed in the same way, but the results appear dark brown. Voilà! Raw Yellow No. 5. Turns out that the brightest and strongest food colors are made from dull gray powders and common chemicals.

Welcome to Sensient Colors Inc. On an open steel grate floor, suspended in the air, acids, bases, and salts are mixed carefully to create food dyes. Measurement reminders are taped to the computers: so many inches of this, so many meters of that. Kelly Walsh, a supervisor, opens the inspection hatch of one for a better look (hold on to your glasses!). Big agitator paddles stir the liquid, creating foam on top. Over the next few days Walsh will pump it out—hot, so it doesn’t crystallize—and around this room of pipes, valves, and vats to be mixed, filtered, further reacted, purified, and then dried in a six-story-high spray dryer, where it is atomized so that when it hits the extremely hot walls it instantly bounces off as a powder. Powdered color.

B
LAND
I
S
B
AD

We’ve been coloring our food since 5000
BC
. Even the ancient Romans recognized that “we eat with our eyes,” often using saffron, spinach, caramel, and spices to enhance the appearance of their foods. Yellow has been added to butter as far back as the 1300s (possibly saffron, but definitely marigolds), a precursor to our rather strange modern desire for orange cheese. Recipes, whether at home or at the Ritz, specify vegetables and fruit by color, from a simple tomato and mozzarella salad with a sprig of basil to a fancy kiwi tart decorated with a single strawberry. We treasure roasts with rich, dark skins.

Sometimes we expect strong color where natural color is actually weak, which may explain why Ocean Spray includes Red No. 40 in its Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice. At Sensient, color scientists repeatedly state that we taste with our eyes before we taste with our mouths. In Australia, an ice cream company found that it sold three times as much passion fruit ice cream tinted with the pink of the fruit than a plain white version of the exact same ice cream (taste was not affected). In Twinkies sponge cake, perhaps the dark orange color—the mixture of red and yellow—is meant to suggest richness, or lots of butter and eggs (of which we now know there is not). Except for when Hostess colored the filling green for a
Shrek
movie tie-in (yellow mixed with Blue No. 1, about as unappetizing as you can get), Twinkies colors work simply to make the cake
look
like fresh cake. The Larousse Gastronomique sums up food colorings aptly: “Their function is essentially a psychological one.”

A Twinkie’s label always identifies it as “Golden Sponge Cake,” but that gold does not come from a precious metal found in the ground. It comes from a precious liquid found in the ground, sometimes called “black gold.” Yes, Red No. 40 and Yellow No. 5 are made from oil, some processed by European companies, some by domestic companies, but most likely from Chinese petroleum refined in the Yellow River Delta, at the edge of the Yellow Sea.

F
ROM THE
Y
ELLOW
R
IVER TO THE
M
ISSISSIPPI
R
IVER

Benzene, a colorless, light, flammable oil, is one of the first things to come off crude oil when it is heated in a forty-meter-tall steam cracking tower at China’s largest refinery, Sinopec, in the Shengli Oilfield on China’s east coast, between Beijing and Shanghai. At night, the refinery looks like a not-so-miniature Manhattan, albeit with colorful pipes instead of streets. This is where both artificial red and yellow begin.

Purple Dye and Perfume

Benzene is the source of the basic materials for food colors and other dyes as well as products as diverse as solvents, detergents, gasoline (to boost octane and reduce knocking), plastics, perfume, and, of course, flavors (as in artificial vanilla, or vanillin). A reaction of benzene with nitric acid, itself a product of hydrogen (usually from natural gas) and nitrogen (usually from liquid air) that have been passed over a thin platinum wire mesh, makes nitrobenzene and leads to the all-important aniline, a colorless, oily liquid with a strong, pleasant odor that happens to be highly poisonous.

Toxic or not, aniline is the backbone of the dye industry. It is the basic chemical from which most dyes are made, including inks, paints, and varnishes. British chemist Sir William H. Perkin created what became the first synthetic dye in 1856 (mauve, if you must know) by accidentally discovering aniline while experimenting with derivatives of coal tar,
14
of which there was plenty in those days, leftover from burning and processing coal into coke for iron-making. He had been trying to make quinine and ended up with a dark goo that, when he attempted to clean it with alcohol, dissolved into a dark purple dye. The textile industry snapped it right up, and Perkin went on to synthesize natural fragrances from it as well, laying the groundwork for all artificial food additives and two robust industries that resulted from his “mistakes.” Thanks to him, Hostess can add color (and flavor) to Twinkies.

Secret Salts and Acids

Shanghai Dyestuffs Research Institute Co., Ltd., the largest synthetic food color producer in China, plays a very important role in creating colors: reacting the aniline with a metal sulfate to create sulfanilic acid (a common metal sulfate is magnesium sulfate, aka Epsom salts).

Meanwhile, Sinopec refines naphtha and ethylene out of more crude oil and combines them to make naphthalene (a rather unlikely subingredient for a food ingredient, this is the main ingredient in old-fashioned mothballs). Shanghai Dyestuffs reacts this with another acid and plain old table salt to make something called Schaeffer’s Salt, the key ingredient in both red and yellow.