SubscribeJanuary 20th, 2012
inside a twinkie
Q.
What ingredients used in Twinkies most surprised you?
A.Vitamins. I didn’t have a clue where they came from, but I suspect that, like me, many people think that they are squeezed from seeds or extracted from bark or something like that. I found they were, by and large, made from petroleum and fermented in enormous industrial plants mostly in China. To find out that a lot of my vitamins, and in particular the B vitamins in enriched flour that are in a Twinkie, were made from Chinese petroleum just blew my mind.
Note to self: never, never, never eat a Twinkie.
January 21st, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Made from petroleum in China. Probably not Chinese petroleum, though.
Their light crude mostly came from Indonesia. Now, shifting to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, etc..
January 22nd, 2012 at 8:38 am
The international state of the food we eat always amazes me – but especially true of highly processed food I suppose. I wonder how many people think about that when they eat dinner?
January 23rd, 2012 at 3:24 am
Well at least some of the food we eat at home are grown in the backyard
I better thank my mum, who used to work long hours at a farm in China.
It’s tempting, though, for some people to suddenly bring up the “Natural is good” story, as if petroleum came from some non-natural place. Petroleum exists as a result of millions of years of decomposing and pressurised biochemicals: what else could they be? A lot of plastics I see around me at home originally came from such ancient sources…but it ain’t necessarily good. I rather consider these products to be quite stable over the human lifespan, or several for that matter.
In a million year’s time, all of this stuff would have transmuted into other forms of matter. Such is the strangness of geological thinking…
January 23rd, 2012 at 10:10 am
I love the idea that the stones and sand under my feet in this region came from somewhere else (many somewhere elses depending on where you are in the region) and I love even more that they are still travelling with me standing on top. Makes me feel like I have my own personal slow moving airplane.
About the natural thing – water hemlock is also natural and I sure as shit don’t want to eat that, but what puts me off about twinkies and other food like that is an experiment I saw once in a kitchen. A block of “cheese” (the same petroleum mix I wonder?) was left on top of the fridge. For months. And months. All that happened to it was that it shrank. Not one bug. Not one fleck of bacterial or spore life grew there in all that time. Why the frack would I want to eat such a thing? Gack.
January 23rd, 2012 at 10:12 am
I grow tomatoes and other foods in my driveway and bit of shared front yard. This year I’m going to have a squash trellis and maybe one for cucumbers. I don’t can anymore but I do freeze. A neighbour got me a free apartment size freezer that I find very useful. Yeah for mothers that have a rural past.