From a Chinese Oil Refinery To Your Twinkie
Food Makers Don’t Often Know Where The Chemicals In Their Products Come From.
When I began researching the ingredients for Twinkies, I naively thought that their raw materials were extracted from nuts, beans, fruit, seeds or leaves, and that they came from the United States. I was looking to link places with foods — along the lines of California wine or Maine lobster, but for thiamine mononitrate. It turned out that I was way off.
Although eight of the ingredients in the beloved little snack cake come from domestic corn and three from soybeans, there are others — including thiamine mononitrate — that come from petroleum. Chinese petroleum. Chinese refineries and Chinese factories. And there are other unexpected ingredients that are much harder to trace. So much for the great “All-American” snack food.
When you bite into a Twinkie, you are chewing on an international nexus of suppliers. Most of our processed foods — salad dressing, ice cream, meal-replacement drinks — are processed with foreign additives: essential ones, like B vitamins for fortifying flour and the preservative sorbic acid, as well as Malaysian or Indonesian palm oil products, European wheat gluten, Peruvian colorants, Chadian gums and Swiss niacin, made from Swiss water, Swiss air (nitrogen) and North Atlantic or Middle Eastern oil. It’s a nice contrast to recall that Champagne comes only from Champagne, France.
Like many other industries, food additives have been off-shored. No major domestic vitamin or sorbic acid manufacturers remain in the U.S. Our last vitamin C plant closed in 2005 — in fact, it closed as I was speaking to an employee about a tour — and most of our artificial colors and flavors come from abroad as well. Our chemical industry is rapidly dismantling its expensive domestic plants and either forming joint ventures with Chinese companies or simply buying chemicals from them. This leads to lower food and pharmaceutical prices, but perhaps at the cost of quality control.
How can you have quality control when you don’t even know where the ingredient is coming from? During my Twinkie research, I was particularly surprised that many American food additive “manufacturers” buy chemicals, especially vitamins, from distributors and do not know, or don’t ask, where they come from. The distributors usually sing the same song, as they often buy from importers, and the importers buy from exporters who — no surprise — are often not able or willing to identify all of their sources.
Now that the tainted pet food scandal has made us more aware that many additives come from overseas, and China in particular — and that some unscrupulous or, at the very least, unprofessional Chinese manufacturers mix cheaper and poisonous adulterants into some food or pharmaceutical products — most of us would like to see some action. What can be done?
First, Chinese and any other foreign manufacturers should fall under both their home country’s and the U.S. government’s regulations and controls. This would take a concerted education effort in China, which has the challenge of teaching small, uneducated and very independent entrepreneurs the market value of meeting American standards.
Second, we need to increase U.S. inspection of imported foods and additives. This means increased personnel and budgets and a serious commitment from the government to a tight, professional program. The Food and Drug Administration should classify additive adulteration the same way the Agriculture Department classifies meat contamination: totally unacceptable. Congress would have to reverse the trend of underfunding the FDA.
Finally, as consumers, we can swallow hard and decide to pay just a little more for well-inspected processed food — or eat more local fruits, vegetables and whole grains and buy minimally processed and sustainably farmed foods.
Smart processed-food and pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to find guaranteed safe alternatives. But consumers must be prepared to pay a higher price for safe food — and to make informed choices about what ingredients go into our food and where they come from.
If you want to have your snack cake and eat it too, you have to remember: You are what you eat.
Steve Ettlinger is the author of, most recently, “Twinkie, Deconstructed.”
© 2007 The Los Angeles Times
And don’t forget the packaging that comes from petrol-based plastic and the transportation and the fertilizers for this “food” product. Oh what an expensive wasteful way to commit mass suicide and destroy what is left of an environment habitable for human beings. This great global capitalist economy can certainly find more efficient methods, non?
Perhaps we could make biofuel or fuel out of them.
oh darn!!! i have sinned! i love twinkies!! yes… we live in a ‘chinese world’. how few realize this. and let’s no forget the owning of the national debt.
This is not new. Anyone paying attention to their diet realized that you should not eat ingredients with more than two syllables or words you can not pronounce.
Rely on the FDA? Can you say excitotoxins; Aspertame (thank you G.D. Searle & Company and Rumsfeld), monosodiumgltutamate MSG, or acesulfame potassium another artificial sweetener that is reported to be safe much like saccharin was.
You can not rely on a government agency to protect the food supply when the FDA is/was suing an American beef provider to keep him from testing every cow for “mad cow” so he could sell the beef to strict Japanese and Canadian markets.
It is always best to eat a simple diet from local sources that you prepare yourself, even then you will never really know if the food is GMO. What wonderful times we live in.
I apologize if I offend…but the first three comments here seem rather trite in the face of the seriousness that this well written article conveys. The first reply includes plastic packaging? I’m not sure about you, but I don’t eat packaging. The second mentions biofuels? Was that meant to be some sort of joke? The third claims she’s sinned because she loves twinkies? I’ld say the greater sin is self-imposed ignorance.
Bottom line, we are being poisoned by the food that is being put on the shelfs in the local grocery marts here in the US of A. Call me whatever, but those that make funnies on it…I’ve got news for you…. You won’t be laughing when your child is fighting for their lives with Leukemia. Nor will you be laughing when you give birth to an autistic child or a down syndrome baby, or to go so far as giving birth to a dead baby and find out that you’re now barren. You won’t be laughing when you change your husband’s diapers because he can’t remember where to go to the bathroom from the dementia he’s developed. And you won’t be laughing all the way to the grave when you’ve been diagnosed with a very rare cancer that is untreatable, as I have been. But amazingly, and I can say by the Grace of God, my over the top numbers all went down miraculously only after I changed my diet to all non-processed whole natural foods, much of which I grow myself. Yes, I do pay more in money when I do happen to go to the local Mart, but what is money compared with living life with your loved ones. Yes, it takes longer and more effort to prepare food that doesn’t come in a freeking box, but I KNOW what my family and I are eating, every bite of it. It’s a joy to eat good fresh healthy food, and I’ve happily become a gourmet cook with natural foods. And in the long run, I pay less in the pain and suffering that comes with this cancer. And you never know, I just may be able to see my 10 year old boy grow up into the fine young man I know he will be.
So you that mock not taking this seriously, and think this is some sort of joke, you won’t be laughing long, cause you’ll be dead.
sometimes people laugh to keep from crying. simma’ down rebecca.
thanks solrak. self imposed ignorance is bad. so is self righteousness. i would have thought my comment on the debt would have been explainitory. i am as fully aware as i can be and i hope that i don’t die too soon. i will keep laughing and making fun. things are serious but so much that smiles don’t help. i still love twinkies.
Rebecca is right on the money. Whole foods is the only way to go. Not out of a box! Food out out of the ground. Eat and live well.
ummm…solrak, sorry hun, but I’m nothing near to boiling, nor am I a self-righteous fanatic. I’ve been around for half a century and have always had the insight and the fortitude to call it like it is. That’s all.
The saddest part is that we’ve been convinced that how we ate before the military/chemical/petroleum industry took control of our food supply is now a luxury.
The fact that good healthy food - and water - costs a premium is a crime. My family tries to eat locally first, organically second and it blows me away what our food budget is compared to our neighbors who shop at the Grocery Superstore. We are creating less waste by buying in bulk and from local farmers (who take back their milk/yougurt jars, egg containers and other packaging that is typically recycled), creating less pollution from the transport of the food, living healthier lives, etc.
Our society has been duped into thinking this is the normal order of things.
I live in Canada, where things are very much in the same sad state. Saskatchewan farmer, Percy Schmeiser (sp?), was sued successfully by Monsanto for “allowing” their seeds to blow into his field and grow there without his knowledge. Welcome to the facist state of North America….where soon companies will control the air we breath, bottle it up and sell it back to us - with slick marketing campaings telling us that they are doing us a favor.
To me the corporate take over of the world’s food supply and the forcing of GM and terminator seeds upon us is something that recieves far too little attention, because once they control the food supply….:(
Twenty years ago a young man I knew was diagnosed with a brain tumor. His mother leaned to the natural and took him to a dietician who got him on a raw fruit/vegetable (and nuts) diet, and the tumor went away! He went back to cheeseburgers and fries and the tumor returned. I have seen other things heal with dietary changes, but few doctors study nutrition! Americans eat FAR too much meat, fat, sugar, alcohol, additives added to the hundreds of toxic chemicals in our own food supply and those streaming in from the sources this articles specifies. Apart from my prized morning espresso (I bought the machine at a yard sale for $8 and it has saved me about $700 a year…) I, too, have learned to eat as naturally as I can. Though I must admit, the organic selection of produce was like a Mecca in California as compared with the choices here in North Florida. The sunshine state is burning up. We need to start some rain dances here pretty soon.
One more point. When I lived in the Florida Keys there was a chiropractor who belongs to a nutritional movement known as “natural hygiene” who GREW all his own produce right on his property. He made it his commitment to visit the local exotic woodwork shops and collecting their mulch on a regular basis built up a serious soil bed that nourished ALL kinds of plants. People with cancers diagnosed as untreatable paid fees to live on his property and EAT only what he grew there and slowly they got well. This is a slow approach and requires self-discipline in a society where not only ideas are manufactured, but so are tastes. (I can’t imagine eating a twinky!) However, this is a powerful path to healing. (And the Mdeity has never loved Dr. Doug or others like him since they create a challenge to the “treatment” of Cancer which today IS big business.)
You must read The Hundred Year Lie by Randall Fitzgerald! He discusses the links between chemical companies, food corporations, the government, and our health.
Whole foods are simply an expensive alternative for many people. I grew up in poverty and my parents could barely afford to buy canned vegetables, which were our healthiest option. I am now a teacher (who, many people say, does not get paid a lot, but it is much more than I ever had in my life) so I am able to spend a good deal of my paycheck on local, organic food. We need to subsidize small, local, organic farmers, not huge agri-corps that are poisoning our bodies and the environment. That’s the only way everyone can afford humane food. At this point, only the middle to upper classes can save themselves from frankenfood, the working class, as usual, will suffer from our collective selfishness and apathy.
Another lovely essay that ignores US reality: if “the people” gave a flying hoot about what they put into their mouths, there would be no McD’s, BKs, Twinkies, or any food product with more than two lines of ingredients, as opposed to the three inches worth of sciencespeak microprinted on most processed products.
“The people” can’t afford to increase their food budgets even ten percent - we’re strapped and going backwards as essentials, like utilities and fuel, continue to skyrocket. The only answer is for the RICH, the WEALTHY, the SHAREHOLDERS in other words, to suddenly denounce their quest for ever more return on investment at any cost and instead demand corporations start operating with a conscience while willingly sacrificing obscene profits for just disgusting ones.
And that will never, ever happen. Remember, the same SHAREHOLDERS own pieces of Haliburton, GE, Phillip Morris, Tyson, FOX, Monsanto, Smith and Wesson, etc. Conscience? In America?
You know,Steve, hats off to you and your twinkie work. I am grateful that someone is writing about the weirdness of what passes for food. But everytime I come across your name and your twinkie epiphany, I remember that in 1998, when my daughter was a freshman in high school, her freshman chemistry teacher started the semester with the declaration that if you changed one molecule in the central ingredient in a twinkie, you would have plastic. Yes, this chemistry teacher told her students, a twinkie is one-molecule away from being plastic.
This was a mainstream, Episcopalian prep school. How come when you talk about the bizarre content of a twinkie, in 2007, it is cutting edge when ordinary h.s. chemistry teachers knew back in 1998?
I guess I am being a little snotty, Steve, but geez, sometimes you sound like you think you are revealing a scoop when you talk about twinkies. You’re not scooping.
Honestly folks…in essence for the basics, it doesn’t really take extra money, it takes the desire to not feed yourselves poison. I have a friend that doesn’t have the room for a garden, she’s dirt poor, no pun intended, and she grows a garden in buckets on a funky little porch with draping plastic in a makeshift greenhouse. For heavens sakes, get creative, where there’s a will there’s a way. And if you do have to shop, you can still find items that are reasonably priced that are not inundated with carcinogens. But that takes effort in that you have to take the time to read labels as well as educate yourselves.
The main problem, we live in a society where people want everything right now, are always in a hurry, and have not an ounce of patience. And they want to work as little as possible to get what they want. America is full of lazy people that complain and do nothing but.
And so we have the highest rate of cancer in the world. Obesity is in epidemic proportions and the problems with obesity in children is now way over the top. I could go on….. But just these few things are the direct result of fast food and crap that is being eaten that doesn’t have an ounce of nutritional value.
So those that love those twinkies etc., and just can’t bring themselves to give them up, God help you if you have children and you teach them those things. You might as well sign their death warrant, because that is exactly what you are doing with the examples you set! I can’t believe that people have so little love for their children that they will not set an example in the very basics of good health and teach their children well. Be thankful you’re not stuck in Darfur.
So whether your residence is urban or rural, if you want to stop putting poisons in your body, or your childrens’ bodies, it’s your choice. Whether you’re rich, poor, or the now mythical non-existant middle class, it’s up to you.
You can’t have it all. For a good home cooked meal, women have to stay at home and cook a home cooked meal. In addition the kids have to have biological father to take care of the household. Till that does not happen macaroni and Chinese chemicals will have to suffice.
What do people who work for the FDA eat?
The idea of putting more money into the FDA, into inspection and enforcement is funny. Not because I against such things. I am considering finding myself a royal taster to eat all foods thirty years before I’ll consider them so that I can see the long term impacts. It isn’t really the best plan, but I’m working on it. No, I’m amused by the notion of government inspectors paid with tax dollars doing all this extra work so that corporations can exploit the cheapest resource and labor sources on the globe. I am amused that we don’t just tell our corporate food companies that they have to get their food from reliable sources and, the first time something bad happens because of neglect in their inspection process, they are going to be fined into the corporate graveyard. It is hysterical that WE are responsible for paying all this extra money so that the corporations can maximize their bottom line. Can we just admit that cheap labor and resources are not cheap? I mean, I guess they ARE because our “representatives” in government are very unlikely to care that we want to eat safe food, and less likely to spend any of OUR money in the pursuit of such a goal. So, no increased FDA funding. No control over what OUR money does. But, still, there is something funny about having a request to take our money and subsidize the food industries lacking quality control go begging! It is too much to ask to let ourselves be fleeced for the purppose of safe food. Man, we are a sad, sad nation.
We have immediate control, if we choose to do so. As the author advises, be pickier about the foods you buy. If you change brands because of ingredients, write both manufacturers, old and new, and let them know why you made the switch.
And, yes, it would be nice if the government worked with us to insure imported food is not toxic. And domestic food, too.
Kalia,
It is actually possible to have home-cooked meals without “the wife staying home to cook.” Two people working together can prepare a week’s worth of frozen meals on a Saturday morning. One person can, too. It is not like each household has to begin the process with raising a cow — we do live in the 21st Century.
And they laughed at John Kerry’s wife when she suggested that farmers go organic.
When money is the only goal and profiteering is unmediated by government concern for its citizens, this is what you get. Personally, I simply stop buying anything from companies demonstrated to be predatory. Tell your friends and encourage that behavour.
Y’all need to read Michael Pollan. In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he describes two beef farms — one a factory farm, and the other, a Permaculture farm (although I don’t believe he actually used the term “Permaculture.”) If you don’t personally know the person producing your meat, you should be a vegetarian. But the same can be said of twinkies!
There is a whole lot going on here, and it is all interconnected. This “globaloney” (as Jim Hightower so eloquently puts it) is about to become deconstructed by expensive energy. David Holmgren teaches us that complexity comes from energy — a tropical rainforest is more complex than arctic or alpine tundra, for example.
As the cheap fossil fuel is all used up, the excess energy needed to support the complex web of global enterprise is going to go away.
What will be left? The only thing of real value in a world that probably has five or six times as many people as it can feed without the help of petroleum: arable land.
So I’m fighting “globaloney” by dropping out: by purchasing, together with others, debt-free farmland, producing our own food and fuel, and avoiding interaction with the greater economy. You can live quite comfortably on $12,000 or so if you make your own food and fuel, and if almost everything else you do is tax deductible!
:::: Jan Steinman, EcoReality Communication Steward: http://www.EcoReality.org
You do not have to eat macaroni and “cheese” chemicals out of a box, even if you have no time. Buy macaroni noodles, they’re cheap enough, boil them, put in real cheese and real milk. That’s not having it all. Buy a cooked chicken, broil veggies. It’s really easy. If you can afford a computer to post on this site and have the time to read the articles and compose messages, you can afford real cheese and can spend 30 minutes throwing something together for an easy dinner that is real food.
The USA owes China a mortgage payment that is frightening. If you think that the elected officials representing you and I (cough) will try to get the Chinese to tighten up their food (chemical) export regulations and or enforcement I have a beautiful piece of land for sale down here in Florida.
Give our buisnesses and Govt. a few more minutes and they will be extorting the wonders of importing Chinese coal for fuel and “food” additives because it’s cheaper.
A big reason so much domestic industrial capacity has been dismantled and offshored has been that the energy to manufacture goods has been cheaper overseas now for the past 30 years. The united states has to import nearly 67 % of its daily transportation fuels and that isn’t cheap.
How expensive will it be to redeploy such infrastructure domestically when crude oil and natural gas become progressively scarce worldwide?