Twinkie, Deconstructed (12 page)

The liveliest effect occurs when the double-acting baking powder undergoes the first of its two reactions (the second is triggered by the heat of the oven). Water invigorates the proteins in the flour so that gluten begins to form; then, the now-liquefied sugar starts to slow them down, as does the shortening. Water reactivates powdered eggs and dissolves almost all of the other ingredients to create the texture of the cake. It dissolves or disperses the cornstarches, corn flour, soy protein isolate, cellulose gum, sweet dairy whey, salt, mono and diglycerides, flavors, sodium stearoyl lactylate, sodium and calcium caseinate, calcium sulfate, sorbic acid, Yellow No. 5, and Red No. 40. It triggers the emulsifiers, mono and diglycerides, polysorbate 60, and lecithin, to do their work, linking water and oil in both the cake and the filling. The whole mix is transformed, first by water and then by heat, into something that did not exist before.

Just as we cannot live without water, neither could a Twinkie. A Twinkie would be nothing more than an oily, gooey mess without it. And much of that oil and goo comes from soybeans.

CHAPTER 10

Soy: Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable and/or Animal Shortening, Soy Lecithin, and Soy Protein Isolate

G
iant machines with open maws that could swallow a bear, lips made of rotating spiral blades the length of cars, pointed teeth four times the size of traffic cones, and jagged-edged circular knives surround me, and all I can think is: Martha Stewart would love this.

I suppress both the urge to laugh and the urge to share this rather bizarre association with the farmer showing me the machines, but, I swear, it is not so far-fetched. It’s a perfectly logical association I’ve made—I’m at the world’s largest John Deere equipment dealership, in Assumption, Illinois, and the stray soybean seeds left in one of the machines (a planter) are pastel-colored, just like Martha’s famed Araucana hens’ eggs. These soybeans have been treated with a fungicide and are colored to make the point. They are Monsanto’s Roundup Ready
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seeds, which grow into soy plants that resist the popular herbicide. Most of the United States’ soybean crop is grown from this kind of genetically modified seeds—80 or 90 percent, in fact (Monsanto controls much, if not most, of the seeds in the world). And these plants are the source of one of the essential baking ingredients in Twinkies and every home kitchen: vegetable shortening.

Soy is one of the most successful and efficient foods in history, and it contributes two other very important ingredients to Twinkies, lecithin and soy protein isolate. Not only is soy full of complete proteins—around 35 percent by weight—but its oil can also be used in such diverse products as anticorrosion agents, diesel fuel, and waterproof cement (presumably very healthy cement). But most of the soybeans grown here—some say as much as 94 percent—are turned into animal feed, not Twinkies.

Despite their dramatic impact on our lives, soybeans, like corn, are a good crop for smaller, not corporate, farms, where they are often grown in equal acreage. Greg Anderson is a fifth generation family farmer, with several hundred acres near Newman Grove, Nebraska, a bit northwest of Omaha. Along with soy and corn, he also grows alfalfa hay and raises cows and calves, and says that while he could always use more moisture, he manages, as most soy farmers do, without irrigation or, thanks to modern equipment, a large crew of farmhands. And he contributes to the United States’ position as the world’s leading producer of soybeans (closely followed by Brazil).

Soybeans have been cultivated for longer than almost any crop—about five thousand years—but it wasn’t until the 1700s that they were introduced to Europe (and 1804 in the United States, as a returning Yankee clipper ship’s ballast, not as a food item or even a cash crop). Soybeans were then used as forage in the United States until the early 1900s, not an auspicious start for such an excellent food source. They were first used here as a popular human food source as late as the 1930s and 1940s, and now, barely two generations later, soybeans are grown on more than 350,000 mostly family-owned farms, covering more than 70 million acres almost entirely in the Midwest (there are more in Iowa than in any other state). For the United States, soy is truly the bean of the last century.

Most farms grow both soy and corn simultaneously in order to spread the work and the sales over various seasons. With technological advances rapidly being made in both seeds and equipment, family farms will continue to grow ever more soy, as demand increases for the bean as a healthy, abundant protein source and the base for three of the most common processed food ingredients: shortening, lecithin, and isolated protein.

Perched in a $250,000 combine, I feel like I’m sitting in the cockpit of an airliner rather than in a fully evolved tractor-planter-harvester. These wonder machines come equipped these days not only with stereos and A/C, but with GPS devices and sensors that link to computer programs that map the entire field for moisture content, crop density, and yield—by the square yard. The innards, controlled by devices with names like AccuDepth™ and Touch-Set™, are loaded with conveyors and devices for processing a variety of crops (corn, soybeans, etc.) that can be adjusted infinitely to accommodate changes in crop density and moisture, too. And all the controls are ergonomic, found in panels that line the arm-rests, joysticks, windshield, and dashboard in ways that Boeing could only envy. Farms that needed several tractors and half a dozen workers a generation ago now can make do with one combine and one helper, as well as an office with a powerful, up-to-date computer that not only interprets all of the combine’s GPS-linked harvest data, but also spews out color-coded reports that signal problems and track productivity.

When the soy plants are a few feet high, the moisture content is low, and the pods are brown (the larger, green, tender variety you eat as edamame are not fully ripened), Anderson runs his combine over the field, sets it to strip the stems and leaves and open the pods, and fills truck after truck with soybeans, ready for shipment to the co-ops, and eventually the soybean processors.

O
IL FROM
G
AS

Everything about oilseed processing is big. Crushing and refining plants are found throughout the Midwest, and Bunge, the world’s largest oilseed processor, with 23,500 employees and annual revenues of $24 billion, operates the world’s largest plant across the Missouri River in Council Bluffs, Iowa. A group of yurt-like tempering tanks, each large enough to encompass a football field, dominates the landscape. Skyscraper-size cement towers, all connected by angled, pipe-covered conveyors, are rimmed by mile-long freight trains that are dwarfed by the plant. (It takes a lot to dwarf such a freight train.) The plant processes 170,000 bushels—about four and half tons—of soybeans every day of the year. ADM, headquartered in Decatur, Illinois, handles more than 3 million bushels a day (90,000 tons daily) at its 100 plants worldwide.

Driving to ADM’s headquarters, I can’t help but note that the roads in this otherwise rural area feel urban, congested with non-stop lines of trucks and trains bringing in soybeans (and corn) for processing. These beans are on their way to becoming pie crusts, peanut butter, and Twinkies. Crisco
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starts like this.

Ag Processing Inc.’s “crushing and refining” plant is situated near the highway that runs between the Missouri River and the nearby bluffs in St. Joseph, Missouri. Surrounded by lush farmland dotted with well-kept farms and silos, it hardly seems out of place, and can seem unremarkable as you drive by. Merely the fourth largest American company in the refined vegetable oil field, this small kid on the block boasts nine plants that process 16,000 acres’ worth of soybeans—about a million bushels—every day. And although innovative processes exist, the traditional method holds strong, as is evidenced by the approach they use here.

The manufacturing of shortening, essential of both home-baked goods and processed foods, starts with the agricultural version of a giant sauna. First, the shelled soybeans are tempered—gently heated—for a week or so in large silos located along the highway. Emerging slightly softened, they then get crushed (into precisely eight pieces if all goes well) between the two rollers of the muscular “cracking roller” machine. Next, the chunks (or chips, as some places call them) are shot into “flaking rollers,” which are about six feet long and have only a paper-thin gap in between them. The rollers crush the bean chunks into round, yellowish flakes the size of cornflakes. However, instead of being uneven (or frosted), these are flat and naturally loaded with oil—oil making up about 20 percent of a soy flake. The flakes are then augured up and over to the five-story-high extraction tower, where they become shortening, lecithin, or soy protein isolate (or soy flour and the like)—but only with the help of a mildly toxic, explosive solvent, hexane, which is obtained from natural gas and is a common component of gasoline.

The process is similar for soy alternatives such as cottonseed oil, sunflower oil, canola oil, and palm oil; the choice changes every few years as more discoveries concerning fat are made or laws are enacted (such as the recent mandate to label trans fats), and this is reflected in the changing Twinkies shortening ingredient list. The most recent list includes cottonseed oil, canola oil, and also the decidedly nonvegetable beef fat. (Beef fat is now a common ingredient in Twinkies, as part of the shortening blend, thanks in part to its lack of trans fats.)

The soy alternatives and partners come from all over. Numerous mills in the U.S. South press cottonseed for oil, right after a cotton gin separates the seeds from the cotton and removes the hulls from them. Canola oil is pressed from the tiny black seeds (a few millimeters in diameter) of a bright yellow flowering, leafy plant of the mustard family developed in the 1970s for its excellent nutritional profile. Most canola comes from Canada (the trademarked name canola was coined in 1979 from the words “Canadian oil”), but close to 1.5 billion pounds a year are produced in North Dakota alone. Beef fat from slaughterhouses is dehydrated, odor-neutralized, clarified, and rendered, usually by specialized companies, into a solid white, saturated fat called tallow. And sometimes palm or palm kernel oil, from oil palm plantations in Malaysia or Indonesia, is included in the mix. These all may appear on the Twinkie label, but as parts of a blend, included to add some characteristic or to cut costs as each bean’s price fluctuates. Still, soybean oil makes up 80 to 90 percent of all vegetable oils processed this way. It works admirably and it is usually the cheapest oil available, so the others are only minor players on the scene. That’s why soybean oil is probably the most popular vegetable oil in home kitchens and why it is the only one described here.

The hexane solvent is so flammable that the entire extraction area, an OSHA “controlled environment,” is off-limits. (Even the company’s own corporate types aren’t allowed in.) The risk of explosion is so severe that wrenches in the plant are made of special alloys that can’t cause sparks. Luckily, Maury Belcher, Director of Corporate Quality Assurance for Refined Oils, has spent years running the show and knows the off-limits parts of the Ag Inc. plant like the back of his hand. Belcher walks me through the process that most companies use, from bean to shortening.

T
HE
F
ORK
I
S
T
AKEN

In the extraction tower, the oil dissolves out of the flakes and into the liquid hexane solvent, which is then boiled to evaporate (and get recycled). Hazardous solvents may seem incompatible with food, but they have a welcome habit of disappearing from it. They’re volatile, after all (some critics doubt that all traces are removed, but the industry is confident that they are. The alternative is expensive, expeller-pressed oils). What’s left is crude vegetable oil, a viscous, amber, beany-tasting oil along with spent flakes, now turned white due to their dried-out state. Both have a long way to go to reach usefulness.

The three Twinkies ingredients—shortening, lecithin, and soy protein isolate—emerge from one of two different paths at this point. The slightly viscous crude oil goes on to become liquid products like lecithin, salad (vegetable) oil, and shortening (in that order), while the edible, defatted flakes go through a “desolventizer toaster” that warms and softens them and ensures all the solvent is gone. The flakes go on to become soy protein concentrate, soy grits, soy flour, textured vegetable protein (veggie patties, mock chicken, etc., for Boca
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and veggie burgers) or, more important, soy protein isolate for foods like tofu dogs…and Twinkies. As Yogi Berra might have said, the fork in the road is taken.

G
LOP AND
G
UM

When the crude oil leaves the extraction tower, a brownish black, smelly sludge—lecithin—settles toward the bottom. These days, “lecithin” has become a generic term for a whole class of fat and water-soluble compounds, but the guys in the biz just call it gum. And the next natural thing to do, is, well, degum it.

Happily, degumming involves something a whole lot less toxic than hexane: good old-fashioned water. Warm water is mixed into the oil, immediately absorbed by the gum, and spun out in a room full of about a dozen centrifuges, each the size of an office desk, less than an hour later. The degummed oil goes on to become vegetable oil, margarine, or, more important for Twinkies, partially hydrogenated vegetable shortening. What’s left is a dark brown thick glop—that’s actually the technical term—from which the added water is slowly removed through gentle heating.

When the glop resembles molasses, it is ready for bakeries or other food companies to process further for their clients (some make “refined” lecithin by bleaching it and/or removing the remaining oil with acetone, the same solvent found in nail polish remover). Others clarify it for use in the nutritional supplement capsules you can buy at the health food store.