Twinkie, Deconstructed (8 page)

In Okeelanta, as in processing plants near cane fields the world over, the stalks are washed, shredded, and crushed in hot water that dissolves the sugar in order to produce cane juice (the remains of the stalks are dried and burned for fuel—many sugar processors are energy self-sufficient). Impurities are removed by adding lime (calcium hydroxide) and a coagulent to remove them and the lime by turning them into a woolly mass that settles to the bottom. The juice is filtered and evaporated into a syrup through a series of vacuum pans whose low pressure causes the syrup to boil at a low enough temperature to avoid burning and caramelization, a neat trick that was developed by a New Orleans–based engineer named Norbert Rillieux in the 1840s. It revolutionized the industry, and this way of using individual but linked boiling vessels, vacuum pans called effects, to evaporate and crystallize sugar is now used to make many similar food products, including the lactic acid, sodium carbonate, salt, and dairy whey for Twinkies.

Crystals that are 97 to 99 percent sucrose, now labeled raw sugar (which is edible, but a bit dark, because it still contains molasses), are centrifuged out. Rivers of it are hosed into waiting railcars or ocean-going barges, most of which take the sugar up north to places like Domino
^®
Sugar’s
6
1930s-era brick refinery in Yonkers, New York, just north of New York City, for refining and shipping to regional bakeries, such as the one that makes Twinkies in Wayne, New Jersey. Other ships go to Domino’s early 1900s plant on downtown Baltimore harbor, an eleven-story brown brick-and-glass cube that boasts the company’s trademark yellow neon sign. The rest of the sugar is refined in Florida.

Kevin McElvaney works for Domino, out of Yonkers, and explains that in days past, the sugar might have gone to Domino’s famous 1857 Brooklyn, New York, plant, which is now part of history despite the enormous neon sign that remains atop it. (North American sugar refining started in New York City back in 1799; by 1907, 98 percent of the United States’ sugar was refined there, which is when the government busted the New York–based Sugar Trust.) The process of refining sugar is not simple, and the refineries are not small. Some plants refine more than 6 million pounds of sugar a day, though the Yonkers plant, despite being more than a mile long, probably averages no more than around 4 million pounds daily.

Sugar refining (to remove the molasses) continues in much the same way as the original cane processing, according to McElvaney. The raw sugar is dissolved in water to remove impurities and forms a molasses-rich sugar syrup that must be boiled down to crystals in vacuum pans once again, after which the crystals are washed and the molasses centrifuged out, tumbled in rotary driers, screened for crystal size, and then conditioned by blowing humidity-controlled air through them for a few days, readying them for the bulk shipment to the bakeries. Because sugar is heavy and trucking expensive, it is only shipped to bakeries within the refinery’s region (New England, mid-Atlantic, mid-South, etc.).

Only a month before, this refined sweetener was still grass, rooted and growing in Florida. That means that while the New York–area Twinkies bakery might get its sugar from Florida via Yonkers, one in Illinois might get its sugar from a decidedly non-tropical source, a sugar beet refinery up in Minnesota. Aside from price, there’s no discernible difference.

Prussian Cossettes

A sugar beet—a short, rotund root that resembles a turnip—looks totally different from sugarcane, a tall, slender, hard stalk. Think of them as the Laurel and Hardy of sugar. But despite their physical differences, the sugar is separated from the plant in the same way. Unlike most sugarcane, beets are often refined close to the farm, in plants made up of mostly square, steel buildings the size of small stadiums, surrounded by silos. Much is done by cooperatives like Edina, Minnesota–based United Sugar, whose Director of Marketing, Steve Hines, points out that its five plants are in just two states that form the U.S. “Sugar Bowl”: North Dakota and Minnesota. United Sugar is the largest sugar marketing organization in the United States, handling more than 5 billion pounds of refined sugar a year, more than 30 percent of the country’s total demand. Hines must like snow, because in a neat contrast to the tropical climes where cane grows, nature provides a handy deep freeze for stockpiled beets in the form of long, cold winters.

A Prussian chemist, Andreas Marggraf, first extracted sugar from beets in 1747; beet processing soon became common by the early 1800s. First floated in a flume to wash off rocks, mud, and sand, the beets are then cut into strips, charmingly called cossettes, which look like shoestring potatoes. As with sugarcane, a hot water bath draws the sugar out, forming a sweet juice (the remaining pulp is processed into animal feed). Lime is used here, too, to purify the raw juice, which is then bubbled with carbon dioxide gas to remove the lime and balance the acidity. Next, the sweet juice is boiled under vacuum (to avoid caramelization) until it becomes a syrup. When tiny sugar crystals are dropped into the syrup, to seed it, regular crystals pop up. Molasses is spun off in a centrifuge, leaving pure white crystals ready for use by bakeries.

The Twinkie bakery is probably using the same sugar, with the same extrafine crystals that you buy at the grocery store, but it buys it by the truckload or 100-ton railcar-load. It’s then unloaded by either being dropped into a hopper under the car or by being sucked out with fat pneumatic hoses. The bakery conveys it to climate-controlled silos—some of which hold as much as 200,000 pounds—and augurs it over to the bakery in an enclosed (and very dry) conveyor.

Liquid sugar for the filling is delivered by tanker truck 45,000 pounds at a time. And then it’s mix, mix, mix—or more accurately, cream, cream, cream—until that shortening is smoothed out and the sugar can start working its many wonders, literally from start to finish.

Refined sugar is pure. Refining it is nothing more than purifying a natural food, McElvaney likes to remind me, a process of separation and removal, not transformation. In sweet contrast to the corn sweeteners that compete for our affection, not one molecule is changed.

CHAPTER 6

Corn Sweeteners

M
aybe the small lighthouse perched on the Mississippi River levee in Clinton, Iowa, looks a little out of place, but what sounds like a Boeing 747 revving its engine for immediate takeoff is what’s startling. The screaming, industrial roar of pure muscle comes from what appears to be a small factory working its way down the river, but is, in fact, a four-story-high, rectangular, white steel tugboat maneuvering a football field–size collection of barges through the strong currents, barely missing the bridge pylons.

This is an everyday occurrence along the river in Iowa and Illinois, where tugs and barges bring thousands of tons of corn to the major plants for processing, including one of Archer Daniels Midland’s (ADM), which is close to a mile long. It is served by ADM’s barges, ADM’S towboat, and ADM’s docks. One barge can hold the equivalent of fifty-two trucks; some towboats lash together as many as twenty barges at a time. A group, called a tow, can be a thousand feet long, just 10 percent short of matching the largest ocean liner ever built, the
Queen Mary 2
. Call it a river liner instead, and note that it carries corn, not caviar.

This plant, made up of dozens of buildings, steam plumes streaming from their stacks and towers, and ringed by railway sidings loaded with freight cars, used to be the Clinton Corn Processing Company, where high fructose corn syrup was first mass-produced in 1967. Most of our food comes from places like this, because most of our food can be traced back to corn, whether to feed cattle or to make sweeteners for foods ranging from ketchup to Twinkies.

In Sydney, on the other side of Iowa, the soil is as good as you can get for growing corn, so loose, soft, and rich in the early spring you can just plunge your hands into it. As such, the land is so valuable that it is farmed right up to the road’s edge, much like the vineyards in France. Most corn is grown on family-owned farms, according to central Illinois farmer Leon Corzine, whose family has done just that for six generations.

Thanks to science and technology, Corzine’s generation farms far more efficiently than generations past. Modern farming techniques, including specialized fertilizers, pesticides, and high-tech combines, not to mention doing less versus more (like leaving the “trash” of stems and leaves on the surface, and not tilling the soil), are actually enabling farmers to build topsoil after losing it for many years. Corzine, who is active in farm lobbying organizations, thinks that this Midwestern farmland is the most productive land in the world.

No farm is very far from a group of silos. An estimated 80 million acres of cornfields cover about 125,000 square miles in the United States. The all-time record harvest—almost 12 billion bushels—was recorded in 2004.
7
ADM, the world’s largest corn processor, handles 9.5 acres’ worth of corn every minute, every day. Most goes to feed animals, but with as many as six hundred products derived from corn and used in products ranging from auto fuel to pharmaceuticals, plastic fibers to industrial starches (and, lest we forget, sweet drinks and snack cakes), the demand for corn is huge. An astonishing eight of Twinkies’ thirty-nine ingredients are made directly from corn—more than from any other single raw material (soybeans are its closest rival, but with only three). If any food symbolizes the almost unimaginably immense corporate agribusiness, corn, the amazing grain, is it.

Nestled in a slight dip in the rolling hills along the Missouri River a few miles southeast of Blair, Nebraska, is a fine example of corporate synergy. There the multinational food giant Cargill (124,000 employees and $71 billion in sales), dubbed the largest privately held company in the United States by
Forbes
magazine (some say the world), has created an industrial campus with a handful of client/partner companies, all of which use something from Cargill’s wet-milling corn-processing plant.

W
ET
M
ILLING ON THE
M
ISSOURI

Tall smokestacks spouting clean clouds of water vapor; tank farms; and stark white silos define the skyline. The verticality of these narrow cylindrical forms is offset by boxy, beige, generally nondescript steel buildings. The whole place is surrounded by lines of giant tanker and grain trucks, as well as by black and white tanker railcars on rail sidings. About 175,000 bushels of yellow #2 dent field corn, the national standard commercial crop, arrive at Cargill’s plant every day of the year—that’s more than 60 million a year—via an endless line of grain trucks, each sporting giant udders of corn waiting to be relieved. The line snakes slowly down a gentle slope from the highway, called the Lewis and Clark Trail, along the western bank of the Missouri River. A sweet, syrupy smell pervades the air.

Cargill can talk all it wants about the plastics, fuel alcohols, and amino acids that it makes from corn, but the Big Daddy, what brings me to what Cargill calls a biorefinery, is corn syrup, including the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup that so fascinates my son.

This is no run-of-the-mill mill. It’s a complex refinery, and the manager, Eric D. Johnson, is a vice president. After a forty-five-minute PowerPoint presentation in a conference room that would easily hold thirty, we take off on a tour. Every door we encounter in the plant is accessed only by a preauthorized card-key entry. “Industrial espionage” is the explanation offered, and it is why I won’t be shown every part of the plant, nor any specialized processing.

Welcome to Blair, Nebraska, a place not known for its gentle climate. Signs pointing to “severe weather shelter” areas are posted in most stairways. Rooftop pipes, insulated and jacketed with sheet metal, are totally pockmarked with deep craters made by hailstones. It’s no wonder that one of the buildings on Main Street houses a construction company whose oversize rooftop sign proclaims it a “hail damage specialist.” Local car dealerships often lose entire inventories to hail. Luckily, it is a sunny day when I visit.

The first tanks the corn hits after being unloaded, the “steep” tanks, are so massive that you sense rather than see them, like the walls of a skyscraper when viewed from the sidewalk. Climbing harnesses hang by nearby ladders. Each tank, about seven stories high, holds about forty thousand bushels of corn, hot water, and a bit of 0.1 percent solution sulfur dioxide—and there is a gymnasium-size roomful of them. The corn soaks here for a day or two in order to weaken the protein, so that it releases the starch when the kernel gets milled. Amazingly, the steep water is not a waste product but is so nutrient-rich that it becomes a fermentation base for chemicals such as citric acid and amino acids, medicines such as penicillin, and a source of animal feed products.

The loudest room, on a higher floor, is a loft full of motors atop milling vessels—plain, squat, covered vats the size of trucks, where the newly softened corn kernels are wet-milled, or ground up, then physically separated into germ (for oil), fiber (for animal feed), and a gluten/starch mixture, which is then separated by bronze-colored, high-speed centrifuges. Gluten is spun off to become yet another kind of animal feed (chicken or pet food; the yellow corn pigments are what make chickens and yolks yellow), while the liquid starch, the whole point of this operation, is piped up to another level to be washed (up to fourteen times!) and, eventually, refined into all those wondrous corn syrups. (If this was a starch plant instead of a sweetener plant, it would be sent off to be dried, chemically processed, or roasted into various cornstarches. But that’s another chapter.)

A sample of fresh, milky cornstarch pulled from a tap on a massive pipe tastes, surprisingly, not sweet at all but bland and sticky. This is the great source of sweeteners, the backbone of the soft drink industry? Hard to believe. But, alas, it’s not a sweetener yet.