|
 You
Are What You Read
By
Margaret Black
Twinkie,
Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients
Found in Processed Foods are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and
Manipulated into What America Eats
By
Steve Ettlinger
Hudson Street Press, 282 pages, $23.95
The
Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
By
Michael Pollan
Penguin Press, 2006, 450 pages, $26.95
We need to pay attention to our food—real attention—and this
means learning where it comes from and how it’s grown, processed,
and delivered. At one time everyone knew where their food
came from, but not now, and small wonder. What is the polysorbate
60 that Steve Ettlinger’s little daughter finds on her food
label? A responsible father, Ettlinger doesn’t just pop off
to Google for the answer. He takes a much longer route, investigating
all the ingredients contained in that quintessentially manufactured
food, the Twinkie. In this pursuit, he follows a host of other
writers down a particularly popular new literary track—probably
first blazed by Mark Kurlansky in Cod—where the author
investigates every possible aspect of a food’s history and
handling, and in doing so stumbles across wonderfully arcane
information.
Michael Pollan, on the other hand, poses the big question
in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Since people eat just about
anything, what are we eating these days, and is it safe and
wholesome? To answer this question he explores four meals,
one made from items in the “industrial food chain” (what most
of us eat from most of the time), one from the organically
grown industrial food chain, one from locally grown organic
food on a farm in Virginia, and one that he literally hunts
and gathers himself.
It’s not altogether easy for Ettlinger to deconstruct a Twinkie.
Some things he says may antagonize Hostess, the company that
sells the little yellow-colored sponge cake with its “cream”
filling. And Twinkies contain a long list of ingredients,
whose manufacturers or processors are often loath to let people
see what they actually do. National security is involved,
they announce. And trade secrets, of course.
Ettlinger’s investigation begins simply, with wheat. He explores
its characteristics to identify the soft red winter variety
used for cake flour, and that leads him to a modest-sized
family farm in Maryland. But that’s the last time he’s anywhere
that we’d like our food to come from. Quickly he arrives at
a plant that bleaches the flour (“no chlorine, no Twinkie”),
which then moves along to receive its “enrichment blend,”
those vitamins—an increasing number from China—added to help
keep us healthy despite the nutrients removed by processing.
Next comes sugar (sucrose). Here is one of many times when
Ettlinger’s experience as a chef lets him explain what an
ingredient actually does. In addition to contributing sweetness,
sugar also tenderizes the cake by absorbing protein in the
flour and by stabilizing beaten egg foam. (Sponge cakes should
have a lot of egg foam; Twinkies actually don’t. Our author
is terrific on identifying what additives replace what originally
important ingredients.) But sugar is expensive, so the ingredients
include a variety of cheap corn sweeteners, and once we arrive
at corn derivatives, Twinkie-making goes full-blown industrial.
Here’s where mega-giant corporations Archer Daniels Midland
(ADM) and Cargill come into the act, processing around 12
billion bushels of corn, half of it genetically modified.
Now the tragic, truly scary, horrible story of present-day
corn and its effect on our food, our economy, and frankly
our ethics is far better told by Pollan, but Ettlinger does
a handsome job of depicting corn kernels as they are transformed
by soaking, milling, centrifuging, heating, blowing in vast
futuristic factory structures to become dextrose, high-fructose
corn syrup (HFCS, a recent laboratory wonder child that’s
cheap, sweet as sucrose, and helps account for the explosion
in worldwide obesity), cornstarch, and a huge host of other
food and nonfood products.
Ettlinger explains shortenings and emulsifiers like lecithin—which
puts fat and water together but it also works like an egg
yolk, not unlike polysorbate 60. But actual wet (as well as
dried) eggs also make their way into Twinkies. In fact my
favorite section in this book describes the “egg-breaking
facility” near Newark Airport that cracks 7 million eggs a
day. After eggs, the ingredients move into items such as cellulose
gum, whey (adds protein, shelf life, gives a smooth texture;
also popular in shampoo, acne medicine, chewing gum, and plastic
packaging), baking powder and soda, salt, mono and diglycerides,
sodium stearoyl lactylate, flavorings (the artificial butter
flavor helps make up for a lack of guess what actual ingredient),
and colorings. I’ve left out a few.
Because Ettlinger seems to fear, with good reason, that his
book resembles those educational movies they used to show
in school, he tries to perk up what are actually fascinating
processes with cutesy cleverness or pathetic alarmism that
produces awful embarrassments like his tedious subtitle with
its ridiculous “mined (yes, mined).” Nevertheless, despite
the clumsily arch tone he sometimes adopts when he thinks
he’s getting too technical, he is excellent at explaining
processes, and particularly when it involves the function
of ingredients.
Presumably because Ettlinger did not come across as a liberal
foodie firebrand, he was permitted to observe far more processes
than was Pollan, and the people who showed Ettlinger around
the various industrial facilities were often very forthcoming.
While Ettlinger is dry-eyed about much that he saw, he can’t
help being impressed by the incredible ingenuity and complexity
of modern-day food-processing and by the discoveries over
the past hundred years that have transformed food preparation
and preservation. Nor can I. It is amazing.
But Pollan, when he talks about the industrial food chain,
clearly demonstrates that a Frankenstein monster has been
unleashed—it’s not lurking in the wings any more. This is
spectacularly clear in the corporate manipulations of corn.
National policy favors an extensive overproduction of corn;
those who grow this corn don’t ordinarily benefit, but the
large processing corporations do, and they find ever more
extensive uses, most of which require ever-expanding consumption
of fossil fuels. Some of these uses seem plausible, even desirable,
but excess corn is also misused, to fatten cattle, for example,
despite the fact that because cows are not natural eaters
of corn (they eat grass), they get sick and need antibiotics,
thereby degrading the usefulness of antibiotics in humans.
While Pollan wasn’t let into many processing sites—he is identifiably
a liberal foodie—he did buy his own steer, which he followed
from the grasslands of South Dakota to a feeding lot in Oklahoma
where he watched the beast stand in a desolate pen, leg deep
in manure, eating corn he couldn’t properly digest. It comes
as a huge relief, therefore, that Pollan later gets to Polyface
Farm in Virginia—what the owners call a “grass farm”—to see
that animals (not just cows, but chickens, rabbits, and pigs)
can be profitably raised for consumption in a fashion that
allows them to live a very natural life. Because Twinkies
don’t contain animal ingredients, Ettlinger doesn’t deal with
issues relating to meat, but this subject adds a vast, difficult
dimension to Pollan’s book.
Pollan regards corporate organic farming as being only marginally
better than the industrial food chain. It doesn’t add pesticides
to our diet, but it requires similar ungodly amounts of fuel
to transport around the country. His organic heart lies, understandably,
with local and regional produce, handsomely exemplified by
Polyface Farm. Managing the multiple components of this farm—forest,
grass, animals, portable fences and pens—is so ingenious its
description is worth the price of the book. Among the many
impressive things about this complexly interwoven enterprise
is that it transformed its site, initially an eroded barren
waste, into a rich productive farm and woodland. The mind
and imagination at work here offer some hope that perhaps
intelligence can be more extensively applied to achieve healthy,
ethical, and sustainable food production, and not just huge
corn-processing sites.
The hunting-gathering escapade that constitutes Pollan’s final
section seemed to me at first a mistake, because I’d mentally
organized his book differently. But I have to admit that it
is one of the best-written parts, and is rewardingly funny
to boot. Pollan becoming a hunter (of wild pig, a pest in
northern California) had me laughing out loud, especially
when he turns on himself, recognizing that he has not offered
one hint of irony in his encomium to his hunting experience.
And his searches for wild fungi—his whole disquisition on
mushrooms—is precisely the sort of fascinating arcane information
I spoke of at the beginning.
Both books let us know much about how our current food supply
system works, and it is clear from Pollan’s compelling indictment
of the industrial food chain, particularly the pernicious
marriage between corn and greed, that much of the system does
not work to the benefit of the general public or the environment.
Yet while the owner of Polyface Farm may respond, “Who needs
New York?” when asked about feeding cities, in reality we
have to figure out how to feed everybody, not just those people
who live near food sources. Clearly a third book needs to
be written, one that initiates a serious public discussion
about how to feed the world in a fashion that is at once safe,
healthy, sustainable, and ethical.
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