Twinkie, Deconstructed (6 page)

N
IACIN (B3
): A
LPINE
O
IL

Niacin is made a world away from Midwestern steel mills. In Switzerland, on the Lonza River just a bit north of the Matterhorn, not far from Zermatt, in the little Alpine valley town of Visp (population about 6,600), window boxes overflow with bright flowers. Perfectly squared-off farms frame the village border. Snow-covered Alps hover nearby. And Lonza Ltd. makes most of the world’s niacin in an ultraclean liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)/naphtha cracker and petrochemical plant, a mini-city of orderly tubes, towers, and huge tanks surrounded by squiggly white and green pipes and covered with catwalks and ladders.

Lonza’s Director of Nutrition, Elias Alonso, the only vitamin manufacturer to offer me a tour, explains the complex processing of simple ingredients. Water and air are two of the three basic ingredients of niacin (water and air are the definition of basic). The third is petroleum, in the form of naphtha or liquid petroleum gas, which is culled from the Middle East or the North Sea and then processed by French and Italian refineries. All together, these three seem an unlikely mix of raw ingredients for a vitamin. First, the petroleum is cracked (processed under extreme heat and pressure) into methane (which leads to acetylene, as in welding torches), ethylene (which goes on to make the common plastic polyethylene as well as a zillion other things), and hydrogen. Air is liquefied and separated into nitrogen and oxygen in order to make ammonia, and is eventually mixed with a little hydrogen, from natural gas, to make nitric acid (that’s the source of the nitrogen, the original “amine” that led to the discovery of all vitamins). The ethylene and acetylene are then mixed under pressure with some water and a rare platinum catalyst to make acetaldehyde, a flammable liquid, which is further processed and mixed with the ammonia. It doesn’t seem very healthy or remotely digestible at this point, but eventually, in a neat bit of forward planning (which is curiously called “backward integration”), some of the previously manufactured nitric acid is mixed with the ammonia/acetaldehyde blend resulting in niacin, a white solid that is milled into a flourlike powder and packed into twenty-kilogram bags.

Vitamin B3 is one of the few vitamins that the body can make, which it does with more finesse than the Swiss by converting the amino acid tryptophan, commonly found in fish, lean meat, whole grains, and, of course, turkey. However, you’d need to consume much more than you normally eat to fight pellagra, that old-fashioned disease that boasts a whole range of symptoms including severe dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death (perhaps niacin should be called the anti-D vitamin).

Pellagra was common in Europe and Central America for two hundred years, and in the rural South of the United States after the Civil War, when cornmeal, which does not contain niacin, became a food staple, along with salt pork and molasses. A more varied diet would have prevented the problem, but farmers at this time were concentrating on cash crops like cotton and tobacco, not food. In the United States, especially in the poor South, pellagra claimed more lives than any other nutritional deficiency—more than 100,000 just since 1900. Niacin fortification simply eliminated pellagra as a death threat. Also, it’s important to note that niacin alone is not only essential for growth and energy, the other B vitamins actually cannot function properly without it.

T
HIAMINE
M
ONONITRATE
(B1): T
HE
F
IRST
O
NE

Although natural thiamine is found in small quantities in many foods, it is the husk of brown rice that led to its discovery; in fact, it was the first vitamin to be discovered at all. Christiaan Eijkman, a Dutch scientist who worked in Indonesia, realized in the late 1800s that only those people eating polished (white rice) from which the brown husk—the rice bran—had been removed suffered from the awful, nerve-damaging disease beriberi. (“Beriberi,” a Sinhalese word meaning “I cannot, I cannot,” became the name of the disease because a victim is too sick to do anything due to extreme stiffness of the lower limbs, pain, and even paralysis.) By isolating the factor that was essential to health in this one case, Eijkman concluded that certain chemicals in food were essential to health in general, laying the groundwork for the discovery of vitamins (and a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1929) a few years later.

In 2005, the world’s largest fine chemical company, the German firm BASF, started a cooperative Chinese venture with the Tianjin Zhongjin Pharmaceutical Co., a couple of hours north of Beijing, creating what is now the world’s largest B1 plant. Each year, BASF expects to produce three thousand tons of a material that is used by the fraction of an ounce in pills and, of course, bread, pasta, and Twinkies.

The manufacturing process of thiamine varies from company to company and is an especially closely guarded secret. But thiamine mononitrate, the most common form of thiamine, is usually synthesized from basic petrochemicals derived from that old trusted food source, coal tar. Thiamine chemicals are finished with about fifteen steps that may include, depending on the company, such appetizing processes as oxidation with corrosive strength hydrogen peroxide and active carbon; reactions with ammonium nitrate, ammonium carbonate, and nitric acid (to form a salt); and washing with alcohol. It is edible at this point, but before it can be mixed into flour, the manufacturer dries it into crystals and sieves it into a fine powder. Some is further reacted with methanol, hydrochloric acid, and ethanol to make thiamine hydrochloride, another popular version of thiamine found in packaged foods.

R
IBOFLAVIN
(B2): B
REWED TO
P
ERFECTION

Great chefs each have their own signature way of roasting chicken or making french fries, and all the giant vitamin companies have their own, usually patented, ways of making riboflavin, also known as vitamin B2. A few make it from chemical synthesis, but most ferment it from a microorganism: yeast, a fungus, or bacteria. Candida yeasts are common;
Ashbya gossypii
fungus is used to make about 30 percent of the world’s supply of B2; and some of the biggest producers favor a bacteria called
Bacillus subtilis
. Some make it from spent beer grain, recycled by the beer companies. In nature, B2 comes from leafy green veggies, liver, fish, milk, and poultry. In manufacturing, it might be fair to say that the vitamin is extracted from natural sources (these microorganisms are all natural to soil), but it is not quite that simple.

Generally the Chinese vitamin companies ferment riboflavin by putting what they call the “master organism” in a stew of various fats or carbohydrates along with some vitamins and minerals and a combination of temperatures and air in ways that vary from place to place as much as cooking technique might vary from chef to chef. With fats, it might be a stinky mix of nutrient-rich waste fats, or cod liver oil or canola or soybean oil. As when making beer, some use a carbohydrate mash made of sugar from beet or cane molasses or liquid rice; glucose from corn is popular, too. Others use specially treated millet seeds, kept for a week at the optimum breeding temperature of 90°F. The enzymes that live secrete what becomes riboflavin.

Whatever alchemy of temperature and nutrients produces the most massive reproduction of these little critters becomes the recipe at that particular factory. And it might take five or ten years to find and develop the best strain of bacteria, using genetic modification. But when done correctly, this signature combination could mean patents and big profits. And so it is seemingly worth it, and all, of course, a big secret.

The largest vitamin B2 manufacturer in the world is Guangji Pharmaceutical Co., located in a modern, well-landscaped plant in Hubei, China, on the Yangtze River. While the plant also makes other raw materials for pharmaceuticals and animal feed, it makes over two thousand tons a year of riboflavin, worth more than a billion dollars. Guangji ferments its brew in tanks that can hold ten thousand gallons, and stand as much as six stories high. Expertise in fermentation is common in Asia, thanks to centuries of fermenting rice for wine and soybeans for tofu. The enzymes work for a few days, finally excreting riboflavin.

The vitamin is extracted from the fermentation broth through a complex process that involves multiple steps (concentration, purification, crystallization, drying, and milling) in order to obtain a deep orange flour-like powder that smells slightly stinky (like rotten wood) and is then packed into little twenty-kilogram drums for shipment around the world. The color is due simply to its molecular structure. (Riboflavin is also used as a natural yellow food colorant, often for Easter eggs. If you take extra vitamin B2 supplements your urine turns bright yellow; Guangji had to build a treatment plant just to get rid of the orange in its waste-water).

Without riboflavin, we’d have trouble growing. We’d suffer cracks around the mouth, sores around the nose and ears, a sore tongue, and light-sensitive eyes, and, most important, we would fail to convert food into energy—more than enough reason to include it in the fortification mix.

F
OLIC
A
CID
(B9): T
HE
N
EW
O
NE

Only a Brit could have discovered folate. In the 1930s, Dr. Lucy Wills found she could cure a certain kind of anemia with Marmite, the dark, yeast-based goo that Brits and Aussies insist on spreading on their morning toast, despite it tasting like a salty, bitter, awful form of molasses. A decade later, the compound was isolated from spinach and named after the Latin word for foliage,
folium
(it is also found in liver, citrus fruits, nuts, and beans, but much of it is destroyed by cooking). Folic acid is the synthetic form for the natural vitamin B9 (folate). Contrary to what you might expect, it is much better absorbed in the synthetic, rather than in the natural form, so if you need to supplement, buy a jar of pills (and don’t tell Popeye).

Because it took decades to identify the benefits of folic acid,
4
it wasn’t until 1993 that the FDA proposed adding it to the flour enrichment mix, establishing 1998 as the compliance date. But since there was such overwhelming evidence that it could dramatically cut neural tube defects in newborns—as much as 50 to 70 percent—millers went ahead and put it in flour even before labels could be printed, and the FDA was happy to allow it.

Despite its thoroughly Western origins and demand, folic acid, too, comes from China. The modern but modest offices of Niutang Chemical Inc., are based in Changzhou, China, a two-hour drive from Shanghai. A major manufacturer of folic acid as well as the artificial sweetener aspartame, Niutang uses one of the few vitamin-manufacturing processes that is relatively clean and straightforward.

Though they keep the actual technique under wraps, the manufacturers admit that they make B9 with fermented as well as petroleum products. The fermentation is done in starch (usually cane molasses, but also tapioca starch or cornstarch). The rest is made from a high-tech soup of an amino acid (glutamic acid, the one that turns into MSG when mixed with sodium; ketchup is full of glutamic acid), a foul-smelling, flammable form of acetone (also found in nail polish remover), and pteroic acid, otherwise known by the catchy nickname, 2-amino-4-oxopteridin-5-yl, or sometimes 4-([2-amino-4-hydroxy-6-pteridylmethyl]amino) benzoic acid, a blend of paraffin and butyric acid, both petrochemicals. (Butyric acid, which is sometimes made through fermentation, is also part of Twinkies’ artificial butter flavor.) This forms folic acid—pteroyl-L-glutamic acid—that is in turn refined, reduced in acidity, purified with zinc and magnesium salts, crystallized, dried, and sterilized until only a fine, dark powder remains, ready to ship off to the flour mills.

M
IXING
I
T
U
P

Vitamins are extraordinarily concentrated and used in small amounts, but containers full of vitamins and other additives are stacked high in the factories of blending houses. American Ingredients’ facility in Kansas City, Kansas, is one of the largest. It has been converted from an old flour mill into a cool (literally), clean, facility with so much stainless steel and tile that parts of it resemble a modern hotel lobby. Bill Olsen, American’s Flour Service Manager, and Don Bruno, its Production Team Leader, escort me through the house. We’re all connected by headsets as Bruno plays museum guide, complete with narration.

Custom, premixed enrichment blends are made in an aptly named dump station where plastic bag-lined boxes and little kegs called carboys surround a guy who is armed with scoops, a scale, and a screen-covered, four-foot-diameter hole, which is actually the top of a giant sifter/blender sitting on the floor below. After confronting the mystery of their manufacture, it is a relief to see the actual vitamins. The containers carry labels from all over the world—mostly China and India, but also Europe, and in the case of ferrous sulfate, Indianapolis, Indiana. They are all the consistency of, well, extra-fine flour, for mixing with cake flour such as that used in Twinkies.

I touch a sample of riboflavin, a bright, deep yellow-orange powder, and my hand is instantly coated. As I instinctively wipe it on my black jacket, Olsen and Bruno laugh: they are late in telling me that it stains quite badly, which reminds me of the fact that bright vitamins are used as food (as well as jacket) dyes, too. Like riboflavin, folic acid powder is naturally dark yellow, smooth and moist; thiamine mononitrate and niacin are dull white. Ferrous sulfate is light gray with a bluish tinge, just as you’d expect an iron derivative to look.