Daddy, What's Polysorbate 60? | Steve Ettlinger | Talks at Google

We'll get started here. And I just want to thank you all for coming today. We're very happy to have Steve Uplinger speak with us today about his new book, Twinkie Deconstructed. It's been a very exciting time for his book. He's had a number of TV and radio appearances and just spoke at UC Berkeley the other day. Just as a few general thoughts once we start to think about it, the Twinkie really has sort of a weirdly prominent place in our popular culture. Twinkies are almost synonymous with what we call or consider junk food. And not only that, we even managed to find ways to make Twinkies less healthy by deep frying them or making them into bigger cakes, which says something about us. Because of the prominence of the Twinkies, Steve has taken it as his case study for his book. By examining the processed ingredients that go into the making of Twinkies. We as readers of course are encouraged to think more about the larger issue of the processed food industry and to give a little more thought, just a little more of the backstory that goes into all the food that we consume on a daily basis. Moreover, it raises, at least for me, it raises questions, interesting philosophical questions about Twinkie ontology. At what point does a Twinkie, or any food for that matter, does a chemical become a food or does a food become a chemical? So it's very interesting, it's something that Steve will talk about a little bit more.

And Steve also mentioned that at some.

Of his previous talks, some of his previous book related events, that they had done a Twinkie tasting, which seems certainly apropos given the context. So we decided to make this into a little bit of a Google twist.

Took that idea.

And the Google chefs at Cafe 150 have made Google Twinkies in the back and they're available for everyone to taste.

Definitely.

Feel free to try that.

Yeah.

That being said, let's give Steve a warm welcome to Google today.

Thank you, Tyler. Hi everybody. I'm really, really glad to be here. It's very exciting. I want to thank Tyler for inviting me here, for the crew here, for doing the video and the audio. I'm amazed that I was invited to join a crowd of distinguished authors. I'll do my best to become as distinguished as they are. And I was also happy and amazed to be here because for the couple years that I researched this book intensely, Google and the web were a very big and comfortable part of my life. Almost every sentence in my book has something Google able, except for the introduction and Conclusion which I sort of just invented and flapped my mouth in. But I was telling Tyler I found just about everything I needed. A lot of my research, in fact, the bulk of it, as you will see, was with primary sources. That is, I went to where the stuff comes out of the ground and I talked to the people who dig it out of the ground and then who manipulate it. But sometimes I had a little trouble with fact. One was I wrote in that Napoleon at one point offered a 100,000 French franc prize to anyone who could find an alternative source of sugar because the British had blockaded the Caribbean islands and he couldn't get any sugar. So my editor asked me to say what that was worth in current dollars. And it was really hard. I did not find it on the web. Somebody here probably will and if you do, I'll give you 100,000 French francs from 1812. No, it's actually worth a bit. The I have to tell you, this book is a little different. I don't think most authors will read to you from their index. But to give you an idea of what I found amusing about the whole project of looking into where processed food ingredients come from is an example of how wide the interest is. I'm going to read to you a random section from the index. Dextrose, diabetes, diacetyl, diesel fuel, diglycerides, diketein, Ding dongs, you know, a few things about ding dongs, directional drilling and DNA. So to say that there's a wide number of subjects dealt with in this book is to say a lot. People always ask me why I wrote this book and why Twinkies in particular. I have to say I'm a curious guy. I'm very curious about a lot of things. And almost every one of my books and I've worked. I've written six others and worked on a total of 40. Usually answer a question I have quite often about consumer items because I don't have a clue. I'm the clueless consumer. I'm the befuddled consumer. So it's sort of personal. I grew up eating well. I went to Paris right after I graduated from college where I had a job right after college, mind you, that took me to two and three star restaurants for every lunch and every dinner for about a month. That was a great introduction into fine cuisine. Also, even in my early 20s in Paris, when I hung out with some friends, we'd go on weekend trips. I was surprised and delighted that those trips, while they were basically party oriented, would often involve food like, oh, I know this farm that has great milk. I thought that was sort of unusual, but we'd go and get fresh milk and it tasted really, really good. So I knew a thing or two about where certain cheeses come from. I had one cheese that was only made by one lady on one farm, probably with the milk from one cow. And I visited vineyards where I knew people and learned firsthand about the word the French use, terroir, which is the everything that gives a local food its character and its taste. So I of course wondered about the polar opposite of that. What about artificial ingredients that come from everywhere and in a sense nowhere. What about those, you know, red number 40, do they have a terroir? Well, I had to find that out. And then the practical answer to how I got to this book is I was doing food. I ended up doing a few food reference books. I co wrote Beer for Dummies with a beer expert who didn't know how to write. And of course I had to do a lot of research to catch up with him about beer. It was very hard. And I wrote the sidebars. What are hops? What's barley? I got into the idea that these things come from places, they have shapes and forms. But even though the words are not familiar to us, how could I do that with artificial ingredients? Well, that was an idea kicked around for a couple of years, didn't go anywhere until one day I was feeding ice cream bars to my little kids at the seashore. I gave them the ice cream bars and started reading the labels like I always do. And my kids say, well, what are you reading, Daddy? I'm reading the ingredient labels. What do they say? Well, it tells you what the stuff is made of. Oh, what are these ice cream bars made of, daddy? Oh, red number 40, high fructose corn syrup. Uh oh, polysorbate 60. I realized I was on a slippery slope because as a dad I of course always have the answers. And I didn't have a Google at the beach there, so I was a little worried. And then my 6 year old daughter asked the singer, daddy, where does polysorbate 60 come from? So I really had to write this book and I thought I would call it Ingredients, but I realized to do all artificial ingredients doesn't make a book. There are thousands. How do you get into that? Well, the book issue is easy. You pick an angle. The hard thing is picking that angle. Eventually I came up with the idea of finding one well known consumer product with a long ingredient list. Not too long, not too short, if you want to do the lights. Now, that ingredient list turned out to be Twinkies. The Twinkie ingredient list became my table of contents. I follow it almost religiously, although I had to give a couple general chapters to introduce things like corn sweeteners. It basically follows that list you see there. Now, I had to start being an organized guy. I thought, well, I'll get a computer program and I'll lay out the geographic locations with the overlay with the seasons that things can be looked at with the dates that I get invited to see these places and filter in the amount of time I need to work on each one. That system lasted at least two, two and a half hours. And then I went with whatever I could get, wherever I could get invited to which the first one that worked out was leavening. Chemical leavenings, which are in the middle of that screen are what we call baking powder. You have, many of you have baking powder at home. Calumet, Clabber girl, they're all about the same. This is a white powder that makes baked things light and airy. And they are made. It is made from rocks, three kinds of rocks, which I find hilarious. Rocks making things light and airy. I was able to get a couple invitations. The first plant I went to was right near the second plant I went to out in southwest Idaho. So I headed for a New Yorker, what I call out west. And I saw that there are still dinosaurs out there. I was very pleased to see that, in fact, a lot of our ingredients come from petroleum or minerals, and that sort of relates to the age of dinosaurs. So I thought this was appropriate. What I also found there, and this is in Soda Springs, Idaho, in southeast Idaho. There's so much mineral wealth there that there are trucks and trains going day and night constantly. Long, long train loads. And the reason I know they go all night is because I stayed in a great little hotel right at the crossing where they blow their whistles every 20 minutes or so. So I was a little bleary eyed when I got up the next morning and went to this phosphate mine near Soda Springs, Idaho. I was also a little surprised when I got there because they said, and here it is. And I said, this is it. This is phosphate ore. It looks like dirt. It's a kind of dirt. It's a nice dirt as far as they're concerned. And they dig it out of this open pit mine, which is pretty big. This is about 1,800ft long. And those little trucks you see are 350ft down. You might see to the right of the big truck. There are a couple tiny, tiny pickup trucks. The front loaders that scoop the ore up and dump it into the dump. Trucks work very fast. Everything is quick because it's so costly. So these trucks are zooming around, I might add. We dodged them very carefully because not only do the trucks have right of way, they could crush us in an instant. Probably not. Notice the front loaders load each truck up in about a minute and a half. These are 80 to 100 ton trucks. So each scoop is about 20 tons, 25 tons. Trucks are pretty big. I stood next to one. You'll notice on the right hand side of the picture there's a ladder that you use just to get to the bumper of this truck. This is the truck that you don't want to have an accident with. I want to get one bring back to New York so I can have an easy time getting parking spaces down the valley. The ore is dumped into a pile with some coke and some silica. Coke, the coal product and some silica where it's baked in the. This is a phosphorus extraction plant. They turn the ore into elemental phosphorus, I should say. They extract the elemental phosphorus from the ore. The first thing they do is put it in a long rotating oven that I think you see on the right hand side. It's 325ft long. It's huge. It looks like a rotating football field. That all goes into the arc furnace in the upper left. Which is the largest electric arc furnace in the world and which maintains a temperature inside of 11,000 degrees, which will melt rock. They didn't tell me why that doesn't melt the oven. I'm still trying to figure that out. I don't know. But anyway, the phosphorus turns into a plasma, into a gas. The gas is handled very, very carefully as it turns into a liquid, as it cools down and then loaded into tank cars that are right there. Why do they handle it carefully? Some of you might know, phosphorus is explosive. It's what they make matches out of and artillery shells. And obviously they make Twinkies and Coca Cola out of it, which is very logical. The phosphorus is sent off to another place to be turned into phosphoric acid. There are other ways to make it. This is the last plant of its kind. The power needed to run that electric arc furnace comes from a power plant that would fuel a modest city. It's huge. And the plants that have been shut down that are like this are now super fun sites. So I was kind of intrigued by being there, by the way. The thing on my belt is an emergency breathing apparatus. The phosphorus was so cool. I knew that it was very flammable. And I asked these guys, well, how flammable is it being guys? They said, hmm, let's show you. And we went over to the loading dock. It was after hours. They said, stand behind this little screen here. Well, the screen was inch thick steel. Gives you an idea of what you're dealing with. And one of these guys donned a volcanologist suit. It looked like a moonwalker, like on the COVID of National Geographic. Big white suit, big helmet, and climbs on top of a tank car. Unscrews what looks like a manhole cover, dips a ladle in it. Much as a vintner in Napa Valley dips a ladle into an oak barrel, pulls out his wine, I mean, his phosphorus, which looks like water and tilts it so it drips back in. It looked like water pouring back in, except for the fact that after six inches it was flaming and that would be shipped off. They let the rail car sit there for a while. As it cools, it gels. It's covered by a layer of water. Keep it safe and it goes off to be made into phosphoric acid. I think they burn it and the smoke turns into. Mixed with water, turns into phosphoric acid. Another way of doing it, a more common way now is to dig up similar ore and soak it with sulfuric acid. Until recently, that wasn't pure enough to use in food, but now it is anyway. That ore typically comes from Morocco, although there's a little of it in South Carolina. So that was the phosphorus. That was one rock. Next rock is a few hours away. Drove to southwest Wyoming, near Green River, Wyoming. Right next to this beautiful hilly area was a flat area and a mine, which they invited me into after I took the mine safety course and learned to use that orange thing on my hip, which is another emergency breathing apparatus. I was also carrying a battery for the light on my miner's helmet, which they told me would last 16 hours. It was at that point that I realized as a food writer, I'd gone really astray. I like going into restaurants, I like drinking beer and wine. Learning that I might need a 16 hour battery in a very dark place was not real reassuring. By the way, they tell you don't look a miner in the eye. It's really, everybody looks bashful because they're all looking down. So you don't blind each other with these lights. Anyway, we went down 1600ft which is as far down as the tallest building in the world is high. And found ourselves in the Trona mine. At this point. The seam is nine feet thick, which is just right for digging and driving. We got into a jeep and drove half an hour. That is big. There are five mines, five companies mining this deposit. This is one of them, by the way, they say there's enough driving service in the. Or an equivalent amount of driving surface in this mine. As there are streets in San Francisco, which I thought was an interesting analogy. This is the old way of mining where they dig a tunnel and leave what they call a room. And then they leave some of the ore there, which is called a pillar. So now they go to the what's called longwall mining method, which they use for coal. We got to the active face and we found this giant claw. I saved this poor man from certain destruction. No, it's turned off. When we were there, the ore came out looking black in the picture. But in fact it's sort of amber colored, translucent. That's almost pure sodium carbonate. And it's the only deposit of its kind possibly in the world, certainly in the country. Just a little footnote. Sodium carbonate is one of the most important chemicals in the world. It's made into soda ash, which is used to make glass, paper and detergents everywhere else. It's made by a chemical process, a very nasty chemical process. And it was in this country until this deposit was discovered. They're good for about, I don't know. They've got billions and billions of tons there. But how much of it they can get out is open to debate. Anyway, this claw goes back and forth along a 750 foot face. In the lower right hand corner is a steel shelf. And then there are steel tongues that push the trona along. Trona is the name of the ore along until it can get onto a regular conveyor belt and sent up to the surface to a plant eight miles away. The ceiling as they dig is held up by these things in the upper right hand corner which look like forklift trucks on steroids and upside down. They're holding up the ceiling and they advance 30 inches at a time. There's 135 of them. They advance 30 inches at a time as the claw there, as I call it, advances 30 inches into the wall. Well, what happens to the ceiling that's not supported right behind these, I ask. Oh, they tell me it just collapses. Big smile. It collapses okay three feet from me. Why is that good? Well, the demiter said it's like with people, you don't want the tension to build up. It's good to release your tension. So I thought that was okay until a little chip from the ceiling fell on my hard hat and I jumped about a foot. So we went back up, we saw eight miles away where the trona comes out of the earth, gets bulldozed around and sent over with a little dust in the air. Because this is. Keep in mind, this is the middle of that brown Wyoming that I showed you above the red truck. You can see a little brown Wyoming there still. And it gets processed. They have like 10 different plants that process it a lot of different ways. And then they send a pipe of slurry with sodium carbonate over to the bicarb plant where I was unable to photograph. They asked me not only for my camera, but for my ring and watch and so forth, which is very typical. I'm going to interject a little digression here. I couldn't photograph in most plants that I visited. So what you have here are some snapshots. And I apologize for the quality of the photos. I was there as a writer. However, I got these, which is nice to have in the bicarb plant. They purify it and they put it into a 40 foot tall kettle with a lot of water and then bubble carbon dioxide through it. So it goes from sodium carbonate to. To sodium bicarbonate, like a big seltzer bottle is what it is. Then they dry it in different ways depending on the size of crystal they want. The people who run these things know how to manipulate it so they get crystals that are sized by the micron, suitable for any particular use. I got to taste some fresh warm bicarb of soda, which did not quite taste like the milk I had at the farms in France. But it was fun to taste anyway. And most of it goes into big bulk containers to cattle feedlots, the kinds that Michael Pollan has described to great effect. Why? Because, as Pollan explains, the cattle are normally supposed to eat grass, but we're feeding them corn. So they get indigestion and they need bicarb of soda just like you do for indigestion. I thought that was hilarious. And some of it goes into the little yellow boxes that you buy and keep it home. One more rock needed for baking powder. I don't have pictures. Limestone. The same kind of limestone they used to build buildings. Dug out of a mountain in the Ozarks in Missouri. Cooked 2,000 degrees in 80 foot tall towers. So it becomes pebble lime, little white Chunks of what they call pebble lime or quicklime, which they ship up to Chicago. And with the phosphoric acid and the other rocks, it's mixed at a place here near the south side of Chicago where they've been making this stuff for 100 years. The calcium source they used to use was the bones from animals that were slaughtered in the Chicago stockyards. Hello, Chicago. This is Chicago Heights. By the way, those of you in Chicago, again, I couldn't photograph inside, so I made the one and only flowchart I'm going to show you, which shows the three rocks on the left. Phosphorus rock, limestone and trona or sodium carbonate, changed into phosphoric acid and mixed with the lime from monocalcium phosphate. The phosphoric acid mixed with the soda ash from Green River, Wyoming, to make the sodium acid pyrophosphate. And then the soda ash, which has been processed with carbon dioxide to become sodium bicarb, and that becomes baking powder. From all over the country we get those little cans of baking powder. The reason for the several ingredients is for those of you who don't bake, and I'm sure some of you don't, I know it may be unusual, but if you take a little of this white powder and put a little water on it, it'll fizz gently. That's releasing carbon dioxide. It makes the bubbles that turn into the holes in your cake in your Twinkie or bread. And the other chemical in it does the same thing, but it reacts to heat rather than moisture. It's all the same thing you get as when you mix vinegar and baking soda, you get a bigger discharge of gas. So I decided I wanted to see another rock we eat. There are five in Twinkies. These three, plus salt and calcium sulfate. They're both really old artificial ingredients. Calcium sulfate has been used for thousands of years to make tofu. It's been used as an additive to bread dough for thousands of years. Salt is the only oldest known non food ingredient, I guess. And it was first used, of course, to preserve food. And then later, I suppose we later decided we liked it for the taste. This is a salt mine, or salt facility, as they corrected me, in upper New York State, near Rochester. That's snow on the ground. That's all this facility makes table salt. It's Morton's oldest facility. It's been going there since 1884. What's up in Rochester and Buffalo in that area? Well, the tail end of the Erie Canal, which historians call the ditch that salt built I didn't know that. But the salt deposit that covers, I don't know, five states is near the surface there, 2,400ft. So they dig down wellheads that are covered by these sheds that are in beautiful farmer's fields. They grow corn or hay nearby and inside looks like a garage. There's a wellhead covered with insulation to keep it from freezing. And it's a food facility. So I'm wearing my beer snood and my hairnet. I love the term snood, by the way. I'm wearing the red hard hat. Because of the homeland security issues, they designate visitors with a red hard hat. I'm so glad you didn't give me one here today because we have to stand out. Anyway, the red thing on the bottom on the floor is a very high tech collection device, otherwise known as a bucket. And I open the valve to taste some brine. It's 100% saturated. They have dug a hole down 2,400ft across and up 100ft away through the salt deposit with a remote control digger that looks like a torpedo. It's called directional drilling. They pump water in one end, it comes out the other at just the right pressure so that the salt melts into it and saturates the water 100%, not 98%, not 101. They're very good at that. That directional drilling is the same stuff they do in the Arctic, for example, to drill for oil when they want to be minimally invasive in the tundra. So they have one rig, but they can reach out a half a mile or so in each direction. Inside, it's very old. These are the oldest vats. They dry the salt in. Actually, they dry it in about five different places. And some arborists got carried away there. Some of the facilities I couldn't photograph in were still pretty boring on the outside. This is Grandview, Missouri, on the edge of the prairie. By the way, how windy is it on the edge of the prairie? My guide in the lower right there, if you notice his long hair is plastered against his head. It was just blowing like 60 there. Anyway, this is where they make mono and diglycerides and sodium steroloy lactylate with ingredients that come from far away. How far away? Those are emulsifiers. Mostly they're white powders, like most emulsifiers in a processed food. They're replacing eggs, milk, cream and that kind of thing, mostly eggs. Monodiglycerides are fats that if the diglyceride had one more glycerin Molecule would be a triglyceride, which is the kind of stuff you don't want in your blood. Where do they get their ingredients? Well, they wanted to be somewhat confidential, so they didn't want to say where they get their sodium from. They can use a variety of sources, but there were freight cars there from Green River, Wyoming, with the soda ash that I had seen mined. They also have stearic acid, which is a really waxy substance at room temperature. In freight cars on the siding, they were unloading it. It's very slow. It comes in solid like candle wax. They hook it up to a steam hose and melt it. It takes about a day because these cars are big. That stearic acid was made probably in Boston, where I went to a plant to see it made from palm oil from Malaysia or Indonesia. The factory I saw in Boston or Quincy, I guess it was, has a dock where the ships come in from Malaysia and Indonesia and so forth. They fractionate it and hydrolyze it and so forth and basically refine it. And it. The stearic acid is shipped out as a liquid, but it solidifies, so they have to melt it. I went up to Blair, Nebraska, to see where high fructose corn syrup and lactic acid are made at a Cargill plant, which is part of an industrial campus. This is on the edge of the Missouri River. If you look carefully, you'll see tiny freight cars in front of the rather large plant. Those freight cars are huge and they're dwarfed by the plant. I was intrigued by this plant because it was one of the few where I saw a constant flow of trucks bringing food. In one side, in this case, trucks of corn, 75,000 bushels a day. So they have a line of trucks 247 just bringing in corn. And what comes out the other end is in large part piped out is dextrose, a kind of starchy syrup, which goes to other factories on the campus there that they use to make ethanol or biodegradable plastic, which is used, for example, to make your forks and spoons here and lactic acid. But they also make £5 million of high fructose corn syrup every day. I love that figure. £5 million. These are billion dollar plants. Cargill is the largest privately owned company in the world. I was very surprised that one of the plant managers had time for me. I said, well, so what do you actually do here? And from memory, spontaneously, he gave me this whiteboard presentation, which at first glance looks pretty complicated, but I can simplify it for you. You have Corn in the upper left hand corner and lactic acid. Can I walk? I can walk. HLA is lactic acid in the lower right hand corner. They don't even describe high fructose corn syrup, which would be somewhere in the middle. But as you can see, they make a number of byproducts. Corn oil, animal feed, calcium, gypsum, which they give to farmers. They bring in lime, bring in bacteria, bring in enzymes, bring in sulfuric acid. All to make these things that we eat so much of. I was very impressed by that. These guys really know what they're doing. I decided I had to get closer to the source. So off I went to Assumption, Illinois, which has this rather unvarying landscape we call. The technical term for it is flat. I'm from Illinois. So as I said to the Chicago people, this is down on assumptions. So I like that. This farmer was very. He said he was typical. He uses Roundup Ready seeds for these are soybean seedlings which he. Roundup Ready seedlings or seeds are made by Monsanto. Monsanto is the company that makes the phosphoric acid that you saw earlier. Most of that phosphorus goes to make phosphoric acid, which is mostly used to make Roundup, the world's largest selling herbicide and the one that does not touch your organic food. Here, Roundup Ready seeds give these plants that are genetically modified to resist the Roundup herbicide. So he can spray the field and kill everything green except these plants. He says that allows him to build soil. I'm not so sure. But in any case, he grows corn and soy and that's typical. And these are often smaller farms. I thought I'd be seeing industrial farms, but they're often smaller. Although they use the latest high tech equipment mostly to grow even the smaller farms. For example, he took me for a ride in a quarter million dollar combine which was fully equipped with GPS technology which allowed him, when he downloaded it to his office computer, he has a little home office to pinpoint within a square yard any area in his field that was not producing up to snuff. It's usually bushels per acre. So he'd identify maybe a dry spot or a spot with some rodents of some sort and go out and rectify that down to the square yard just from the harvest information correlated with the gps. I thought that was astounding. It was also intriguing. What do you do to solve the problems? You're using all these high tech Cs. You're using the High Tech Combine and the GPS. But when you Find a spot that's not performing. What do you do? He said, well, in some cases, maybe you have to improve the drainage. Maybe you have to fill in a low spot, something like that. Okay, that's cool. But in some places he finds varmints, rodents, whatever. And he says he just likes to go out and shoot them. And I love thinking there's this farmer with all this equipment at his disposal and he's going out there with his little.22 and shooting one little gopher at a time. I thought that was hilarious. But anyway, so I went nearby to Decatur, Illinois, which is really the belly of the monster. It's the headquarters for ADM and Tate and Lyle and many of the other major corn and soybean processing companies. Certainly ADM is the largest in the world. This is one of their installations in Decatur. It's a small town. It's loaded with these plants. This is a picture from my motel room. Ironically, the town itself is very urban. This is the power supply for one of the plants. The carbon footprint, I would say, is not small. The town is crisscrossed with pipelines and rail lines. Constant movement, trucks loaded. The streets are loaded with trucks. And a nearby plant, the Semporia, they have, I think ADM probably has four or five plants like this. They're very big. The old brick building is the remnant of its predecessor, which was a whiskey making plant. You know, they processed corn for whiskey. This is in Clinton, Iowa, which is where they invented high fructose corn syrup. There's no bronze plaque there, but there really should be. In 1967. It wasn't actually very high at that time. They didn't get their high until sometimes sometime in the 70s. The 55% is the holy grail to make it as sweet as table sugar. By the way, it wasn't until about 1980 that it started being used when Coca Cola switched over to using high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar. So that's an important date for nutritionists as well as for chemists to keep in mind. So this plant is about a mile long. These are not small plants nearby. This is on the Mississippi. I went for a walk on the levee. You can see the levee if you look on the right, how it slants down. I was taking a stroll. It was sunset. When I heard what I thought was a 747 landing nearby or taking off. It was, in fact this four story high tugboat, which looked like a factory in the water, struggling to keep its small toe of. They call it tow the group of barges in line in the currents and to make that little gap ahead where the swing bridge is, those barges are carrying either soybeans or corn to the plant. Like with the trucks, like with the trains. They have a constant supply by barge as well in the Mississippi River. How big? Everything's big here. How big are those? Well, each barge holds equivalent of 52 tractor trailers. This is a small toe, so that's 200 tractor trailers worth of corn or soybeans right there. Many toes are longer. They can be as long as 1,000ft. They're getting up to Queen Mary length at that point. Here's another size image. This is a flour mill. You'll see in the book. I'm not allowed to identify it, and I couldn't identify the person I spoke with, although he let me in and he was, you know, the big, big hotshot. It was more of a corporate thing. They had permission, but not officially and so forth. But this picture I took from the roadside. So it's nothing secret. Let's talk about bigness. Those silos hold 500,000 bushels of wheat or flour. Wheat in this case. They have a couple of rows of these. 500,000. Let's see, a bushel of grain the other day was going up to $16.73 a bushel. So you're looking at about $8 million worth of stuff in each of these silos. The trucks that are dwarfed by these silos are flour trucks. They hold £50,000 of flour each. In the building to the right, they do the final mixing of the enrichment blend. The flour, white flour in the States and in many other countries has to be enriched because we've taken out the nutrients that were in the whole wheat flour. Those vitamins, vitamin B vitamins and folic acid are put in through a blend that they buy from a so called blending house which I visited. They mix minute amounts of vitamins with some kind of wheat flour or wheat gluten. And then they have a metering device that doses the flour as it's going by on a conveyor belt with the right amount of the vitamins. It's all micro measurement. The vitamins fascinated me. At the blending house, I saw these big vats of vitamins being mixed from boxes that were shipped in mostly from China and India. That's right. Most of our vitamins are now coming from China. And if you ask people here where vitamins come from, almost everybody. I asked pharmacists, pharmacologists, teachers, scientists, people at the blending houses about all they could do is say they got it from some company. No one really could say for sure where the vitamins come from. And let me tell you, I used Google a lot to try to answer that question. If I were to do a next book, at my pleasure, I would do vitamins. Ultimately, I traced some of them to China, one a mineral, to the United States, although a lot of it comes from India, and one to Europe. I did get invited to the place that makes niacin in Europe and I wanted to go, but I couldn't justify it. It was just one paragraph in a book and it was my only invitation in Europe. It's too bad. They're at the foot of the Matterhorn in a gorgeous valley. A refinery type plant. But they bring in air for nitrogen. I love the idea that this big plant, one of its raw ingredients is air. So they have an open pipe somewhere, just sucking it in and they make ammonia and that's their nitrogen source. And petroleum. Most of them are made from petroleum. Some are fermented in maybe a corn syrup base, but they are not made here anymore. Except for the iron, I started to say the ferrous sulfate. There are two sources of iron in your supplements. Ferrous sulfate, which you can buy in the drugstore, is largely made by running raw steel through a big bathtub full of sulfuric acid, which I thought was pretty cool. If you see elemental iron listed on your ingredients, then you know that it's just iron that's been scraped and it's just little bits of iron and it's very, very fun. A lot of that comes from India, so security is tight. Oh, oh. Back in the flour mill, they also have a little torpedo like little submarine like device with maple paddles inside that whips the flower up in a sort of mistake. And then they zap it with chlorine gas. Toxic explosive chlorine gas. Now chlorine gas, think about it. If you ever have heard of a major evacuation because a truck carrying chlorine turned over or a rail car derailed with chlorine, they evacuate like 40 miles around. So here in the flour mill, one reason for high security is they have these little, they call them pigs, little iron containers of chlorine gas, which they zap the flour with to bleach. It takes a millisecond and. And it also destroys the protein so that you have flour that's suitable for making cakes with a soft protein. You don't want a hard wheat in your cakes. Hard wheat's for pasta or bread or pizza. Dough. Those are all high protein flours. So that was pretty interesting. I had to wear, again, a red hard hat. Every door was locked, often with a code for entry. A lot of reverse air pressure to keep the dust down because dust is explosive. So there's a lot of danger here. That's not what you would think. It's not like phosphorus exploding or ethylene oxide. Flour dust is explosive. Some of you may have noticed last week, Thursday, week ago, the big sugar plant in Georgia blew up and it was just organic dust. My editor loved that. You'll see on the back of the book, it says, oh, flower dust is explosive. Like, oh, my God, Twinkies are dangerous. So when I went to Wapun, Wisconsin, to a big cheese plant, being a potential terrorist, they had to follow homeland Security rules and dress me in red, my hairnet and lab coat to make sure I didn't, you know, that people keep an eye on me. I thought it was because I was from New York. I couldn't tell. Anyway, this is one of the biggest cheese plants in the country. They laughed when I was embarrassed. I walked through a door and stepped into this white goo and I thought, oh, my gosh, I messed up. They laughed because that's disinfectant, which they spray on the floor by every door. Keep your shoes clean. This is a bad picture, but one I like a lot because it shows pizza mozzarella being made. This is a little distant from your artisanal cheese making 20 pound blocks, going down a river of brine and on their way to Pizza Hut or Domino's. Anyway, when you make cheese, you take milk and you separate the curds for the cheese and the whey, which is almost, almost 100% water, it's very difficult to dry and purify and do it without cooking it. So they came up with a very elaborate set of pipes which. You think your software designs are complicated. Look at that. Can you imagine plumbing that? There's centrifuges in the front. They have room after room like this. I found it awesome. I photographed it in black and white just because it was so beautiful. But it made me realize that this is a real nexus. Everything's complicated. The fact that whey is a natural product and in fact used to be a waste product, by the way, in the early 50s, they were still dumping it out the back of cheese plants when the farmers noticed how good the weeds were growing back there. And some genius thought, well, you know, let's try that as fertilizer. And now, then they started using it as using it as a fertilizer on plants. And then somebody realized, well, if it came from something natural and it's helping our plants, maybe we could eat it. What's funny is people were drinking whey hundreds of years ago, but we'd forgotten that. So they started looking into using it as a food source. I have to say it's an excellent source of protein in its concentrated form, and it's giving soy protein concentrate a run for its money. In any case, this was sort of emblematic of how complicated everything is. And I realized that the 39 ingredients which are listed on the right here came from. When you cross reference that with all the raw sources, you really got a nexus. I call this the Twinkie Nexus. Please forgive me, I like 20 questions. So I put it into animal, vegetable, and mineral sources. Those of you who know more will say, well, bacteria, yeast, and fungi don't really fit. That's right. But what surprised me the most was how much comes from minerals, especially crude oil and natural gas. This is not just Twinkies we're talking about. We're talking about all processed food ingredients. Crude oil and natural gas account for the raw source for many, many ingredients. If you look, there are a lot of lines going from there. Limestone is just surprising. The others, of course, were mostly new to me, but not entirely. Oh, by the way, my favorite vegetable source is trees. I never thought of trees as a vegetable. Trees are vegetables. And when you process trees for pulp like you would for the paper business, you can also process them. If you wash the nasty chemicals out for food, they're a good source of cellulose. The best source of cellulose is cotton. Now, we tend to think of cotton as a fiber source, but you have cottonseed oil, of course, and the fuzz on cotton seeds, it turns out, is almost 100% cellulose. So little mills all around the country in cotton growing land, first take the fuzz off the seeds before they squeeze them for oil. And then they sell that fuzz to people who process it into cellulose gum, which is one of the secret ingredients in the cream filling of Twinkies, I'm pleased to say. I don't know if it's key. It's mostly vegetable shortening and also our old friend polysorbate 60. So that is sort of the end of my trip to see where the ingredients come from. I'll be glad to take questions, but if you want, I can show you another flowchart on polysorbate 60. If you want to see where polysorbate 60 comes from, like my daughter Chelsea. Should I show you the slide or should we go to Q and A? Show the slide. Okay. It does grow on trees. Palm oil or oil? Palm trees. In Indonesia and Malaysia, you could say polysorbate 60 grows on trees. It's also a plant. Corn comes from. Corn that's easy enough to understand. And petroleum. So the palm oil is processed into stearic acid pretty quickly. It's hydrogenated like hydrogenated vegetable oil. And corn is pretty much the same thing. Make a corn syrup and hydrogenate that into sorbitol. When you mix the sorbitol and the stearic acid, you get a sort of weak emulsifier, which you see on ingredient list. It's used in a lot of breads. Sorbitan monostearate. If you parse those words, you don't have to be a chemist. You can find out where each thing comes from. That's what I did. I kept asking the people who make the stuff, well, where does the sorb come from? You know, what does the stearate suffix mean? What does mono mean? And most of the time it doesn't matter. But in this case, sorbitan monostearate was made in the early 50s. They needed something else to make it a better emulsifier. And right about that time, improvements in chemistry, people realized ethylene oxide, a toxic explosive substance, could be mixed with it to make a great emulsifier. I have no idea what it was like for people to realize that. Why would they search that out? I don't know. But they did. And we got a nice egg replacement. It's nice fat. Here it is, polysorbate 60. So that's where all those things come from. I'd be glad to take some questions. You can ask me anything. I won't guarantee a good answer, but I'll give it a shot. And I'd like to ask you, did anybody know where polysorbate 60 came from? Before I see one hand. Wow. I was asking a lot of the scientists, well, is polysorbate 60 better than polysorbate 80, or is it cheaper? Or what's the difference? And where does the name come from? 60, 80. He said, no, this is the guy who makes the stuff. So I asked another guy who makes the stuff, and, oh, I think it's. I don't know. So I had to go all over. They're using making this stuff all the time. And then a few people offered definitions that didn't quite work, and they weren't sure of. I Found that if you ask a farmer what kind of corn they're growing, they know. I was a little surprised about that. Ultimately, I found out it had to do with the molecular structure and it was just a convenient designation. Some had ended with a 16, some with an 18. And they took that last number and they made it into 60 or 80. They're a little different. Polysorbate 80 is used in ice cream a lot. Both are used in shampoo. It's a great thickener, by the way, that sample I had, I asked the person who sent it to me if I could taste it. It is a food, after all. He said, well, it's pretty potent. I wouldn't taste it because you won't be able to taste anything else for two weeks. So there you go. Okay.

So you said a lot of the factories wouldn't let you take pictures and probably wouldn't let you see some confidential stuff.

Right.

What are your thoughts on how we're expected to eat food without being allowed to know how it's made?

That's a very good question. I found the opacity of the whole thing appalling, really. I understand the need for industrial secrets, but the fact that they weren't, in many cases, were not geared to explaining where it comes from, how they make it or what they make it with was wrong. Just plain out wrong. Now, in their defense, some of the companies that didn't let me in simply were smaller companies and they were too busy. And I also don't expect everybody to open the door to me. But I also. I did expect them to be able to explain somehow what they're doing, and we should be conversant with that. They are, on the other hand, fighting chemophobia. And I tried not to do that in my book. I made fun of it sometimes, the chemical names and so forth. But the fact is, when you eat an apple, you're eating chemicals. There are a lot of chemicals in an apple. If you only referred to an apple by its chemical ingredients, you'd probably think it was something scary and not want to eat it. So I understand what they're up against. Still, I'd like a little bit more. For example, sorbic acid. Preservative. It's the only preservative in Twinkies. Very strong. It's used in just minute doses. Wonderful, wonderful preservative. Apparently very safe. It breaks down into, I think, carbon dioxide and water in your body. It's a fatty acid. It's a cousin of olive oil. So you think, okay, that's benign. And apparently, according to them, it is. A little more on that later. But in the process of making sorbic acid, some of the intermediate processes call for a source of carbon and oxygen. And the chemists use a really great source of carbon and oxygen to make the stuff. It's called carbon monoxide. Well, so I'm eating something made with carbon monoxide. The Penguin lawyer made sure that I said the carbon monoxide disappears. In fact, it turns into carbon and oxygen. But it still gives you pause. Now, I'm not sure whether it's a good idea to know that something safe is made with carbon monoxide. It makes you not want to eat it. I can't answer if it's dangerous or bad for you, and I won't. On the other hand, it might make you want to eat your broccoli. And a lot of people eat their whole foods because they don't want to deal with something that was processed with carbon monoxide. I don't know if that's fair or not.

A follow up question. Do you think that the companies you said you went to like a very old salt mine, do you think they sent you to certain facilities that maybe would look better in your book and things like that? Maybe places that don't use the more disgusting processing methods?

No, they were very proud of that. I got a full tour. It was wonderful. It was filled with history. They preserved part of the old warehouse there with the post still pockmarked with axe marks from the barrel makers. I love that. And they sent me there because it was the the facility near where I was. And they actually make the blue cardboard containers from Morton Salt there too. With machines from about the 1940s. It was really neat to see the one big company. Some of the big companies might only show the stuff they're most proud of, but they're large, they have a lot of that. So I don't think that was an issue. Okay, a couple questions back there. Hello. Just a quick question. What's your shopping experiences like right now? What's your shopping experiences right now? If you go to Safewares, some other store, do you have any ingredients that are on the black list in your household? Well, actually, it's a good question. No, you know, a lot of people want to know, was there something in Twinkies that's killing us? Well, there were trans fats in the shortening before, which they took out. Which reminds me, when I asked scientists, food scientists, about a particular additive like sorbic acid, is it safe? Oh, they say we've been using it for years, so of course it's safe. Shortening has been around since 1911 and it was killing us, So I don't buy that argument. No, I buy whole foods. If I'm really worried about it, I'm not totally worried about it. I think the problem is when you eat a lot of the processed foods. And I did not make a big point of it in the book because I thought it would be boring to continually say this stuff is bad for you when it's not really certain how and why it's bad for you. On the other hand, yeah, I shop for the vegetables and the whole wheat bread and, yeah, a little more than. More than I did before. So Twinkies recipe undoubtedly changes over time. Are they getting better? Worse? I mean, if you'd done this 20 years ago, what would the ingredients have looked like, or how different would it be? Well, you're asking two questions. Are they getting better or worse? My lawyers tell me that. I'm not going to comment on that. The recipe has changed. When they were introduced in 1933, they were probably made with eggs and milk and cream and so forth, and they spoiled in like three days. That's not good for anybody. You can't put a cake on a shelf and expect it to last very long. Little digression. The Twinkies with the cream filling, any baker here will tell you they have really gotten it down to keep the moisture in the filling and not have it soaked up by the sponge cake. It's a real art in the food science there. Over time, they've come up with recipes to solve that problem. That change because a particular ingredient may become unavailable, or they may change a machine in the bakery and want to use or avoid using a particular ingredient. Or the price may fluctuate on a particular ingredient in a way that's not favorable. So the recipes change from factory to factory or bakery to bakery. And I found labels while I was working on this, to my great shock, that were a little different in Florida from New York. Some were kosher, some were not kosher, et cetera. By the way, many of them used to be kosher and no longer are because to eliminate trans fats, one of the solutions is to mix unhydrogenated oil, that is liquid oil, regular oil, with fully hydrogenated fat, which, for example, is beef fat. Beef fat is a fully hydrogenated fat. You mix the unhydrogenated with the fully hydrogenated, you get the equivalent of partially hydrogenated. Other solutions, all those companies are working on different kinds of genetically engineered soybeans, sunflower seeds and what have you, all getting into the food chemistry. So the recipe changes with machinery, with label laws, with price fluctuation and with availability. As a result, I kept getting different bits of information. It was quite a challenge. Oh, yes, sir. When was the last time you ate a Twinkie? And do you think you'll eat one again? That's a good question. I did eat a bunch. During the research, I had some fun experiences. First of all, I wanted to describe what I was listening to from the experts. They were talking about the quality of the crumb. Light, airy, heavy, oily. The quality of the cream filling. So I wanted to get that personal experience. I find them oddly appetizing, but I really don't like all the oiliness. I cannot handle it. They're oily, I think, because the Twinkie people, the hostess people, want them to seem moist. But it's not moist, really. It's oily. So I have a lot of trouble with that. And I probably won't eat anymore, But I end up eating a few for, you know, for a stunt or whatnot. But I'll tell you, I had some. A nice version of the ones that your chefs made here today. Last year, vegan, organic, whole wheat, low fat, low calorie Twinkie. It was delicious, except it was dark brown. I really liked that a lot.

So, Steve, one last question. During your research, are there any interesting debunking of Twinkie myths that we seem to have? I don't know where we get them from TV or cartoons about Twinkies lasting hundreds of years and through a nuclear holocaust. Anything about that you want to dispel?

I can't believe the number of myths around Twinkies. I. People always tell me Twinkie stories, by the way, as I've traveled around, people come up and confess to me. I've become a Twinkie confessor. I didn't eat Twinkies as a kid. I was a cupcake guy, that type of thing. Or that they really loved them and maybe they still do. But I think everybody wanted to know if they'd last forever. And I was so sorry to point out that if you unwrap them, they get stale fairly quickly. They seem to dry out. Not the filling, not the filament. It's pretty stable. But the crumb does dry out. But they don't spoil. They don't spoil. And I tried putting one outside once, trying to see if it would last, and it disappeared overnight. But the next day we saw this squirrel staggering around the backyard. It was really. I can't quite figure out why that was.

Thank you again for coming, and it.

Was a pleasure to have you. My pleasure. Thank you. I'll be glad to autograph books.