Twinkie, Deconstructed (31 page)

At this point, as far as the chemistry goes, the companies clam up. Some hints are available, though. Two acids are essential ingredients: nitric acid (again) to make red, and tartaric acid for yellow. Synthesized from aniline (and ultimately, benzene), tartaric acid was first made from other acids in yet another process developed by the ever-creative Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who also first isolated oxygen, chlorine, and lactic acid, in 1769.

It seems somehow fitting that Yellow No. 5 can start in the Yellow River Delta, even if the chemical has nothing to do with the river’s namesake yellow mud. In any case, once the acids and salts are fully processed, they are dried into gray powders—technically salts—and shipped to plants around the world, probably including this almost spotlessly clean chemical plant near the Mississippi River in St. Louis.

Concentration and Going by the Numbers

The highly polished floors have a slight pink tinge to them. Special shoe covers are required to prevent tracking anything around. Of course, considering what they make here, they’d better keep it clean, or there would be no end to the mess. (It takes thirty-six hours to clean the packaging line when it’s time to change color runs.)

Most of the dyes are shipped as powders or granules in boxes or small drums. These dyes are so concentrated that there is no need for larger containers, as even the biggest industrial consumers, like Twinkies’ bakers, use only minuscule, microscopic amounts. A flask of water that has been tinted with just one drop from a solution of one-tenth of 1 percent blue dye, the equivalent of a single drop in an eight-ounce glass of water, sits on a counter in the quality control lab, and it is virtually opaque—that’s all it takes. A figure of 50 to 100 ppm (parts per million) is typical for cakes, for example, or only 5 to 10 ppm in drinks such as pink lemonade. That’s not a whole lot, which is why colors are usually the last items listed on an ingredient list.

Despite their strength, and how little companies use in a single product, more than 17 million pounds of artificial food coloring are made every year in the United States. (This same concentration means that the security at color plants has been beefed up since 9/11, and it’s why I’m not giving too many details about my plant visit here.) Some are shipped as liquids, either pure or mixed with solvents such as water, propylene glycol (the kind of alcohol also mixed with flavors), or glycerin, an oily by-product of vegetable-oil refining (also used to make mono and diglycerides). Glycerin is what you usually find in the little supermarket bottles of food coloring on your kitchen shelf.

Judging color quality is not the least bit subjective, as is evidenced by the high-pressure liquid chromatographs and photospectrometers (which represent colors in nanometer-long wavelengths) found in the quality control lab. Next to the lab is a large corporate-looking conference room that serves as a reminder that all the high-tech stuff is useless if it doesn’t please the customers—in this case, the major food companies and, ultimately, the mass-market consumers. A bookcase full of client samples represents a perfect cross-section of an American supermarket and its puddings, cereals, candies, yogurts, and so forth (I am sworn to secrecy as to which ones are here).

It seems logical to ask what the numbers 5 and 40
really
mean, but, curiously, neither numerous industry experts nor the FDA could say, offhand, when asked. It took some digging to reveal that the numbers signify nothing more than the order in which manufacturers submitted the artificial colors to the FDA for approval (each batch made is certified for compliance, too). Color regulations for artificial colors came into being back in 1906, with the first Food Act. There are a few reasons why there are some apparent gaps: most of the missing numbers are for colors approved only for nonfood use (for drugs or cosmetics, the “D&C” part of the name); some were approved and never used; and some may not have been approved at all. (Some were banned for various safety concerns, including Red No. 2 and Violet No. 1.) So Yellow No. 5 is no better than Red No. 40 despite its lower number—it’s probably just older. In any case, we only need three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. All the rest are just variations on a theme, the rainbow of seven basic colors.

W
HEN
N
ATURAL
I
S
N
OT

Not everything made at the St. Louis factory is synthetic. Boxes full of seeds of dried fruit pods of the evergreen shrub
Bixa orellana
, named after the historian and botanist Don Francisco de Orellana, who worked for the conquistador Pizarro, arrive at the factory from Peru. Still more come in from Brazil and Kenya. These bloodred seeds yield the popular orange-golden yellow colorant annatto (also known as achiote, rocou, bija, orlean, and the poetic CI Natural Orange 4) once the pigments are extracted with a combination of vegetable oils, alkaline solutions, and heat (and organic solvents for nonfood uses).

The ancient Mayans knew annatto since antiquity, using the concentrated red to represent fire, the sun, and blood. We use it mostly for the much less dramatic task of coloring cheese. Popular in both seed and powder form, it is easily found in grocery stores that cater to Latin Americans, who use it to give a basic golden yellow hue to rice and chicken dishes.

There are twenty-five other natural (or exempt, as in “exempt from certification”) colors made at color companies around the world, the most common being: turmeric (a deep yellow from the tuber of a five-foot-tall flowering green plant grown primarily in Cochin, India); anthocyanins (a red/pink/violet from grape skins, red cabbage, elderberries, black currants or other fruit and vegetable juices); titanium dioxide (a white mineral mined from iron ore that is also used in white paint); caramel (brown, from carefully burned sugars, usually corn syrup); and carmine, perhaps the most exotic color due to its rather unusual source.

The fascinating, rich magenta carmine, also known as cochineal, is extracted from the dried body of the female cochineal insect. It takes about seventy thousand insects, which accumulate on the paddles of prickly pear cacti and are simply brushed off and dried, to make a pound of colorant. Large plantations are found in Peru, the primary source, but also in Guatemala and the Canary Islands. When Oaxaca, Mexico, was the center of Mexico’s monopoly (until their early eighteenth-century revolution), cochineal exports rivaled silver in value. The output of the Canary Islands is used almost exclusively to color the Italian aperitif Campari, but some is found in common foods, such as Dannon’s boysenberry yogurt.

The best thing about natural colors is that they are presumed safe, seeing as they occur naturally in food and plants. On the other hand, natural colors are not necessarily as intense or as easy to incorporate into a recipe, as they are three to five times more expensive than petroleum-derived colors (all that food handling costs something), and, more concerning, they might add some unintended flavor to the recipe. Regardless of the hue, artificial colors do not add flavor—a big advantage.

Still, colors derived from natural sources are often made at the same plants as purely chemical ones, and because they have been processed (or synthesized, in the case of beta-carotene), they are simply no longer considered natural. A label describing these colors can say, “color added,” “artificial color added,” or actually name the color, but it can’t say “natural color.” The FDA still classifies them as artificial unless they are coloring the very food they come from, e.g. strawberry juice added to strawberry ice cream.

In any case, while it seems that not one natural color is used in Twinkies, sometimes the label has said “color added,” which would make me suspect that annatto, the butter and cheese colorant that is popular with their competitors, is indeed in the mix. But their punctuation indicates otherwise. “Color added” is followed by “(yellow 5 red 40)” which would seem to indicate grammatically that they are the only colors involved. The FDA guidelines are simply not as clear as, say,
The Chicago Manual of Style
.

M
AGIC AND
P
ISTACHIOS

Sensient’s color service lab in its St. Louis plant is essentially colorless. An enormous, antiseptically clean, brightly lit black, white, and gray space with a dozen stations full of clear glass beakers, gray stainless steel sinks and scales, clear glass cabinetry, and black stone counters, it is also seriously quiet. The white walls are almost devoid of color or art, the exception being some color pictures from its brochures. High-pressure liquid chromatographs, Coulter machines that make microscopic measurements of crystals, spectrometers, and computers are gathered at one end. Cubicles devoid of paper line one wall. This is where scientists concoct the color solutions for name-brand food product clients.

An enthusiastic scientist bounds at high speed from spot to spot, calling out to junior associates for supplies, gathering beakers and tiny spatulas. The atmosphere is charged with anticipation. A pinch of dark brown powder dashed into a beaker of water turns it strawberry red (FD&C Red No. 40); a pinch of dark orange powder turns another beaker of water a cheery lemon yellow (FD&C Yellow No. 5). That the dissolved colors are so much brighter than the powder is just a setup, though. The scientist takes another sample, a light brown blend that looks just like cinnamon, and asks me to guess what color the water will turn (“Um, brown?”). He smiles with glee as the water turns a dark, lush green. “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” he teases. You sure can’t, certainly not here.

Now, on to dry mixes. A dash of the powder, shaken with a few tablespoons of dry sugar, yields nothing but a slight beige tinge. A dash of the same color, in “lake” (water-insoluble pigment) form and shaken with the sugar turns it bright green. Put the same powder—the lake—in water and it sinks to the bottom of the clear beaker as if it were sand. Lakes, which are metallic salts (made from aluminum), color dry mixes in their packaged form (think Country Time
^®
Pink Lemonade mix), packaging materials themselves, and in gums and fats—wherever you need a dry color.

As we leave, I pass another black-white-gray lab area and am jolted by the sight of something brightly colored in the middle of the counter, far from any computer: a huge bowl of red pistachios. Work in progress.

CHAPTER 26

Consider the Twinkie

F
inding that Twinkies ingredients may come from as far away as Chinese and Middle Eastern oilfields and involve products from facilities as wide-ranging as steel mills and deep mines may be surprising, especially for such a familiar, small, sweet, everyday item. “All this just for a little cake?” is the obvious question. The answer is yes—because the implications extend far beyond the Twinkie.

THE TWINKIE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

When you consider the Twinkie as a product—which it truly is, in every sense of the term—it’s not that hard to fathom its link to the world economy. Twinkies’ ingredients are the products of a rural-industrial complex, made from a web of chemicals and raw materials produced by or dependent on nearly every basic industry we know. Where do they come from, my kids wanted to know. They come from an international nexus: the Twinkie Nexus.

Twinkies are obviously connected to food industries such as corn, soybeans, wheat, eggs, and milk, but, in fact, Twinkies ingredients are also manufactured with fourteen of the top twenty chemicals made in the United States, not even including salt (which goes into chlorine) or petroleum. The unlikely food subingredients sulfuric acid, ethylene, lime, and phosphoric acid top the list. The Twinkie Nexus is huge and complex.

That industrial aspect of our food—and Twinkies are but one among tens of thousands of processed foods—would be less troubling if it were easier to still see where it all comes from. There is often no terroir to an ingredient, no one place that it is actually
from
. And between commoditization and competition, most industrial food ingredient suppliers are not easily identified. Most of the vitamins are made in China, essentially placing their manufacture beyond normal scrutiny, and most of the enormous and politically powerful agricultural commodity or global chemical conglomerates simply will not make themselves available. The whole scene is quite opaque. These companies’ embrace of science is simply limited by their obedience to the marketplace and governmental policies. One only need recall the recent discovery that partially hydrogenated oils, which were supposed to be better for us than butter, are actually worse, because of trans fats, or that they unrelentingly promote the unnatural use of corn to feed cattle, or that they fully embrace genetic engineering. But we love the results and express this feeling unequivocally with our purchasing power, enthusiastically demanding more protein sources, a wider range of food choices, lower prices, presumably safer and less spoiled food. These are plainly political angles on biology—there are choices to be made—so it is up to us to keep on top of things in the food world.

The fact is that chemicals, especially those in foods, are part of nature. Perhaps a pertinent question is, “When does a chemical become a food?” (“It becomes a food when you decide it is a food,” is the tantalizingly vague answer offered by a food scientist with whom I spoke. And what about when you use a food ingredient as a chemical—like the use of cellulose gum in oil well drilling?) It appears to be a matter of perspective. Take flour, for example. Even this most basic, common ingredient seems a product of global technology and commerce when you account for the enriching and bleaching that goes into producing it for Twinkies’ use. Parse those words—enriched, bleached—and you learn that flour is mixed with some of the most heavily processed chemicals in the world: vitamins and bleach. It takes a global industrial effort to make enriched flour, to build strong bodies—and to make little snack cakes.