How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (13 page)

Looking to maximize those pans, Dewar, a longtime bakery man who entered the business in 1920 as a wagon driver, concocted the Twinkie. He named it after a billboard he saw for a company called Twinkle Toe Shoes on a trip to St. Louis. (“I shortened it to make it a little zippier for the kids,” he said.) The new cakes, which went on the market at a nickel for two, weren’t like the yellow wonders we taste today. Dewar originally kept with the fruit theme, creating a creamy banana filling. The key: unlike strawberries, fresh bananas could be found throughout the year.

The Twinkie was an immediate success, but it needed another unexpected turn to reach its full height of popularity. During World War II rationing made it impossible to source enough bananas to keep the production lines going. With little choice, Hostess was forced to come up with an alternative—the creamy vanilla-flavored insides used today. After the war, there was no need to return to the banana flavor as the new center proved more popular than its predecessor. Nowadays some 500 million Twinkies are sold annually. As for the banana cream, it has been used in limited runs with much success.

Sure enough, over the years, the Twinkie has become a foundational item in American pop culture. Archie Bunker described it as “WASP Soul Food” on the hit 1970s TV show
All in the Family,
and there are even Twinkie recipes for such varied dishes as Twinkie Pancakes and Twinkie Sushi. Not surprisingly considering his then-penchant for sweets, President Bill Clinton included a package in a 1999 time capsule celebrating the millennium. While some may think disposable Twinkies are an odd addition for a time capsule, think again. A Maine teacher once claimed he kept a perfectly good-looking Twinkie next to the chalkboard in his classroom for thirty years (Hostess sort of ruins that party, asserting their cake really only has a shelf-life of about twenty-five days). The treat’s darkest hour—beyond when nutritionists take potshots at it—came when Dan White, who murdered San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978, said his intake of junk food was evidence of the depression that led to the killings. The media dubbed it the “Twinkie Defense.”

Yet, through it all, Dewar stood by his strawberry-inspired (or lack thereof) creation. “Some people say Twinkies are the quintessential junk food, but I believe in the things,” he said decades after the invention. “I fed them to my four kids, and they feed them to my fifteen grandchildren. My boy Jimmy played football for the Cleveland Browns. My other son, Bobby, played quarterback for the University of Rochester. Twinkies never hurt them.” As Dewar lived to the ripe old age of eighty-eight on a diet that regularly included the spongy treat he may very well have been right.

Additives and Extras

Alka-Seltzer: Newspaper discovery

The biggest story a journalist at the
Elkhart Truth
ever broke never made it into print. In December 1928, the small northern Indiana town of Elkhart was hit by a countrywide cold and influenza epidemic. Businesses in the area were barely staying open with so many employees calling in sick.

One day during the outbreak, Andrew H. “Hub” Beardsley made a trip over to the
Truth
, a local community newspaper, to have a friendly chat with its managing editor Tom Keene. Hub and his brother Charles ran Dr. Miles Medical Company, a local business specializing in remedies. Their big seller was something called Dr. Miles’ Nervine, which allegedly treated such “nervous” ailments as headaches, backaches, epilepsy, and sleeplessness. They also sold Dr. Miles’ Cactus Compound for heart ailments (it might have helped the heart, but with its main ingredient being 23 proof alcohol, it’s unclear what it did to the rest of the body). Despite some success the Beardsley brothers were really looking for a bubbling concoction, known as an “effervescence,” that could be a cure-all.

While Hub wasn’t searching for his answer when he walked into the
Truth
that day, he did notice something peculiar. None of the newspaper’s employees were absent. Shockingly, they all seemed to be working away as if the flu scourge had passed them by. Hub was intrigued and asked Keene how this was possible. Keene delivered the monumental scoop: He pulled out a mixture of aspirin, bicarbonate, and lemon juice and explained that whenever an employee began feeling sick, he’d just mix up the bubbly combination. Instantly Hub knew he’d found the product he’d been searching for.

He went back to his laboratory and charged his chief chemist, Maurice Trencer, with putting the elements of the
Truth
’s magic elixir into a tablet. Within a week, the scientist had created Aspir-Vess, which was later renamed Alka-Seltzer. (The new name combined “alkaline,” a term for an acid-repelling element, with the popular fizzy drink “seltzer.”) While the product was marketed for a number of ailments, including such far-flung problems as exhaustion and a bad temper, from a food-and-drink perspective it became a go-to item for upset stomachs and hangovers.

But more than even its medicinal qualities, Alka-Seltzer became a triumph in marketing. Hub’s brother Charles invested heavily in sponsoring radio shows, which gave the product a huge bounce. Later, their television commercials proved to be classics. There was Speedy, the tablet’s cartoon spokesperson, who whisked around with a wand making people feel better. An ad depicting a man offering the post-meal lament “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing” was a huge winner in the 1970s and the mantra “plop, plop, fizz, fizz/oh what a relief it is” became ubiquitous in the 1980s. The catchphrase “That’s a spicy meatball” was also part of an Alka-Seltzer campaign.

In large part, the success of Alka-Seltzer made Elkhart a very prosperous locale. At one point, the town reportedly featured forty millionaires—or approximately one in every thousand residents. Alas, Alka-Seltzer and its parent company, which were purchased by Bayer AG in 1977, have since moved the main office. In 2009 Elkhart earned the dubious distinction of having the fastest increasing jobless rate in the United States, jumping from 4.7 percent to 15.3 percent in a single year. Sadly, there are some ills that even a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets cannot cure.

Artificial Sweeteners: Sloppy scientists

You’d think that rule number one when working with chemical compounds in a lab would be don’t taste anything unless you’re absolutely certain what you’re putting in your mouth. After all, we even tell little kids on the playground to follow that rule. But for those who can’t get through the day without a Diet Pepsi or a Coke Zero, it’s fortunate that apparently many scientists aren’t too worried about following that childhood missive.

Each of the original holy trinity of artificial sweeteners—saccharin, cyclamate, and aspartame (aka NutraSweet)—was discovered by researchers who just didn’t think to wash their hands. As for the most recent, and today’s most popular, artificial sweetener, sucralose (known on the street as Splenda), it has its own different but equally accidental origin story.

Saccharin was the original sugar substitute. In 1879 one of the century’s most revered chemists, Ira Remsen, was doing research on coal tar derivatives. (If you wonder why saccharin has that awful aftertaste, coal derivatives might give you some sense.) During research, an associate, Constantin Fahlberg, accidentally spilled some of a substance he was preparing on his hands. Overcome by intellectual curiosity—rather than common sense—he took a lick and found it to be incredibly flavorful. It turned out that the mixture was 300 times as sweet as basic sugar. He named it saccharin after the Latin word for sugarcane,
saccharum
.

While saccharin went on the market as an alternative to sugar, its bitter aftertaste did somewhat limit its value. What was needed was another sweetener to mix with it that could lessen the bite. Cyclamate, which was discovered in 1937, wasn’t as sweet as saccharin, but proved to be its potential partner (though some studies have indicated the combo can cause cancer). Yet again, its discovery came from another messy scientist.

Michael Sveda was a student at the University of Illinois working on some sulfamates that were expected to have promising pharmacological properties. He got his hands dirty—so to speak—mixing these compounds and didn’t think anything of it when he went for a cigarette break. After taking a long drag from his smoke, he noticed something very odd: Chemicals on his hands from the experiments had soaked into the cigarette creating a sweet taste.

Proving that scientists don’t always learn from the past, James M. Schlatter had his own unclean story when it came to finding the combination that led to Equal and NutraSweet. In December 1965, after getting some aspartame powder on his hands, he licked a finger in order to help pick up a piece of paper. He noticed the strong sweet taste (some 200 times greater than sugar).

Shashikant Phadnis’s mistake, which led to Splenda, wasn’t a product of poor cleanliness. It was due to miscommunication. In 1975, the native of India was a student at Queen Elizabeth College in London working on an experiment with a highly toxic chemical called sulfuryl chloride. At one point in the proceedings, Phadnis’s adviser asked him to “test” his work. Maybe it was the professor’s British accent, but the student thought he said to “taste” his work. Despite the toxicity, the dutiful student followed orders. Panicked, the teacher asked if Phadnis was crazy. But fears soon turned to excitement when it turned out that the mixture’s toxicity had been neutralized and the result was a calorie-free powder 200 times sweeter than sugar.

Baking Powder: Adoring husband

Baking powder doesn’t seem like a building block for romance. But the invention of this product—which would become a fantastic yeast substitute for making bread, biscuits, and muffins—was essentially a love letter to a woman. The yearning man who channeled his feelings was Alfred Bird. A pharmacist from England’s Birmingham area, Bird set up his own shop in 1837 dispensing the usual elixirs and medicines.

The new business kept the twenty-four-year-old Bird busy, but the man had something more important to consider. He’d recently married and, unfortunately, his fair wife Elizabeth wasn’t the stoutest of individuals. Most notably, she suffered from digestive problems, making bread products nearly impossible to enjoy. That wouldn’t do for the newlywed Bird. He resolved to devise some way for his bride to enjoy scones and morning toast.

It didn’t happen overnight, but in 1843 Bird came up with a substance he called “Fermenting Powder.” Later renamed baking powder, the stuff did the trick. Not only could Elizabeth enjoy bread without tummy troubles, but the results were also lighter and fluffier than many traditional breads. Bird then matched his marital devotion with an impressive business sense. He invested heavily on marketing, giving away free calendars featuring ads for his powder. One of his favorite mottos was “Early to Bed, Early to Rise, Stick to Your Work and Advertise.”