Twinkie

In the Newsweek review of Twinkie Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger, the reviewer sounded surprised to learn that “food grade plaster of Paris” was used in the manufacture of what is both fondly and notoriously known as America’s most famous “junk food.” The review accentuated the surprise if not personal insult of the presence in food processing of such elements as: “glue, disinfectant, weed killer, and industrial materials.”

So it is that we at the street level routinely lump food into a cherished and at the same time simplistic category of “purity” without regard to the technical tricks required to transport a tomato thousands of miles from its home range. Like as not in the middle of winter. A short list of the amendments necessary for a nice mid-winter tomato range from plant breeding, chemicals to stabilize color, antibiotics, fumigants and age suppression also in the form of chemistry. Any below the horizon discussion of food entails chemical benchmarks most consumers would rather ignore because it destroys the comfortable mental image of our food supply as emerging without any help from the Periodic Chart. Neither can we identify our food moods, motives, or fads without comprehending the role of food in the American experience is not just biological nourishment. Food isn’t about breakfast, lunch and supper, in the modern experience food is part of the entertainment industry, the Dave Letterman and the afternoon soaps.

The First World shares nothing like the distress of many of our fellow humans who are both under-caloried and malnourished. The typical American is over-fueled by an embarrassing margin. Food in this context is disconnected from the biological need and is instead a function of play. An ever ever-expanding array of convenience foods demonstrates more of a cultural dimension as it does a biological one. When food is distanced from basic fueling, the classic three squares per day, taste and texture parameters become guiding factors; indeed they become playful, theatrical. When this happens many of the simple nutritional values of food are lost. Why? Because we don’t need them. Entertainment food doesn’t need vitamins because it’s not really food.

Processing to this design often strips away the most nutritional parts of the original food-stuff, resulting in a final product that is surprisingly crude in formula but complex in form. Potatoes on their way to potato chips acquire a thousand-fold increase in calories while the dilapidation and high heat of manufacture reduce resident vitamins to a minority in the final product. The real downside of entertainment food…play food…is given the occupational setting and caloric demand of the average consumer the resulting food product becomes an abject biological negative. At the same time when the central need of the world’s malnourished is simple calories.

Twinkie Deconstructed is a tutorial of how modern foods are constructed; whose end purpose is not nutrition but entertainment. Ours is a food system designed for mass consumption, world-wide distribution, long shelf life, the microwave, the two-income household, quick meals, packaging, zero clean-up, little or no preparation, solitary consumption, bachelors, widows, student housing, television, and eye appeal. For a citizen whose greatest caloric demand of the day is walking to his or her car, food is not about potatoes and gravy, it’s about play.

What is in our food and how it is manufactured is what Twinkie Deconstructed has to tell. Much of what we eat has been “twinkied” on the way to our plate, often to the surprise of the average consumer. Despite our lives are safer, easier, more luxuriant, warmer, faster, and longer by the earnest use of chemicals, we do not equate this input with our food. Twinkie Deconstructed is not just about the machinations that produce our food supply but the American attitude toward food. A veritable theater is food with many plots, guises, character parts and of course bad guys. On one end of the spectrum is the organic, complete with its enhanced mood and sense of self. On the other end are massive stock-market driven entities propelled by billions of units sold with implications on pension funds everywhere. Caught in the middle in a sort of invisible tug of war is the farmer and the landscape. In one corner is the incessant quest to reduce inputs, in the other are the demands to be sustainable, protect the aquifer, buy local, sell direct, hopefully with a mate working off the farm for the sake of health insurance.

At issue is bigness, bigness on the farm the same as in the corporate setting, where the emerging mega-farm is wedded to a favorable position contract, whose competitive margin means volume is the only bottom line. The loser is not just the consumer fed an increasing array of food-stuffs, some of whose dietary values are absolute negatives, but the landscape of agriculture reduced to an input role only. Lost in the melee of ever more dominant big players is the chance of farmland community complete with a land ethic. In shorthand, local foods, local markets, local jobs with far-reaching consequences on energy demand and foreign policy.

Twinkie Deconstructed is a worthy read because how we farm isn’t up to farmers but is instead the choice of consumers who know the difference. The questions asked are national in scale and moral by implication. What is the real value of a local food source? What are the environmental, health and cultural implications of continued farm consolidations? What is the end result on both landscape and nature, on our cultural diversity, on our personal choices? Is it too impolite to ask of our society whether that old-fashioned role of homemaker is still a virtue? How we answer this alters the identity of our food, and with it our food supply, its calories and its consequences.