Photographer Dwight Eschliman has posted lovely photographs of all 37 of the ingredients inside a Twinkie. Each sits on a plate and is shot from above and boast rich tones and textures, reveling in an unexpected complexity that contrasts how we normally think about the icon junk food. This one is FD&C Yellow #5.
Dwight Eschliman [via Boing Boing]
Ah. So that’s why it came out so poorly last night. I forgot the diglyceride.
I’d avoid triglycerides in your food if at all possible.
I’d avoid food in your food if at all possible.
Yo dawg….
I saw what you did there …
Monoglyceride + Diglyceride = Triglyceride?
Mmm, HFCS… Oh, wait, that shit will kill you!
funny how the regular corn syrup is darker, probably cause its less refined
Oh nooes, what about their secret ingredient patents!?!?!
No quantities listed…most of the first row is what’s in ‘enriched flour’…a few of the scary chemical names are just the chemical names for vitamins.
I imagine these will be hard to reproduce after the apocalypse without a chemist (despite all the hoorah about their survival on family guy).
Yeah, ZombieLand TOTALLY called this one.
I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you those 37 ingredients and tonight you give me the Twinkie you made. Fair enough?
Does not look much like food.
That’s cause it isn’t.
except for the flour, sugar, water, eggs, salt and cornstarch
reminds me of what The Crying Indian would’ve said.
Looks tasty.
Now go deep fry that sucker and really make it tasty/healthy !
Did everyone else know that Cellulose Gum is a powder? I expected it to be something squishy.
Yes, I use cellulose gum as a suspender for pottery glazes.
Guar gum and xanthan gum also come in powdered form. It beats shipping them pre-dissolved in water.
But, ‘Where’s The Cream Filling ?” ?
The iron looks like engine block dust………
ever wonder what happens to junkyard cars? now you know.
You can use a magnet to gather visible iron powder from your bag of corn flakes, if you ever want to.
**If you rotate the High Fructose Corn Syrup by 90 degrees it smiles at you with teeny eyes
Cool stuff, but the story is a couple months old…
http://gizmodo.com/5560149/the-37-or-so-ingredients-in-a-twinkie
Its also not a story.
America wouldn’t be the same without Twinkies.
I have never had a Twinkie before, and these photos pretty much have just shown me that I am not missing much…
Um, why the heck are there two separate pictures of dextrose and glucose? More worryingly, why is dextrose depicted as a powder while glucose is depicted as a liquid?
(Chem refresher: dextrose and glucose are the same identical substance; it just happens to have two different names that people can use.)
Perhaps it’s L-Glucose? That would explain the laxative effect food like this gives people…
I bet they buy the “cream filling” in bulk and the manufacturer there uses glucose, while the cake is baked with the powdered dextrose.
It could be Lupus……
HOUSE!
I’m guessing that the basic reason is that both are listed as ingredients on the package itself, as can be seen here -> http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_FzLB7mNEfYw/R1LMyBPXyII/AAAAAAAAA-8/vi7dQOz36Ec/s1600-R/sm_Twinkie_IMG_2594.jpg
The more complex answer is for the question “why are they both on the official ingredients list”
I was about to post the same thing. They should both be the same and be represented as solids, so I don’t know what that’s about
Red no. 40 is gorgeous.
Like a woman…
Animal shortening? Isn’t that generally called lard?
Yes, but people would rather read names they don’t understand on an ingrediant list than “lard”.
That Dextrose looks suspiciously like Sorbic Acid.
I dont see any Die Hard or Zombieland references yet…
Tell him about the Twinkie.
“What about the Twinkie?”
You could just eat around the buck shot…
In Mexico, you know what they call Twinkies? Los submarinos.
There you go Aliena. You just beat me by mere minutos.
I lost count at 4 different kinds of sugar…
i think there were six all together… though i dont know if Cellulose Gum is a kind of sugar so it might be seven… thank god i dont eat twinkies
Frozen twinkies are the best – yummmmmm
I love how in the Pixar movie WALL-E, he brings home items he finds in the 700 year old trash that he considers valuable. One of the things he brings back for a meal for his friend the cockroach is a 700 year old Twinkie, in like-new condition, filling and all. Yum.
Too bad they aren’t in proportion.
Yuck. I have always hated Twinkies, ever since I was a kid. Any cream-filled snack/dessert I generally do not like, including doughnuts, and yes, Twinkies. I remember my best friend used to have one every day with her lunch in elementary school and I thought it was so weird that she never got tired of eating them! Gross!
fat, sugar, salt- twinkies are the perfect habit-forming food. I’d say those who like twinkies REALLY, REALLY like twinkies.
I went through a phase of severe twinkie addiction myself. Thankfully i was cured, though I think the thing that cured me was the ding dong.
You’d be amazed from where many of those ingredients are made in the first place, and how they came to be developed. Many are mined, cracked from petroleum or natural gas, catalyzed with sulfuric acid, acid etched from rolled steel, “manufactured” by bacteria, and other bizarre things. Absolutely fascinating.
Read “Twinkie, Deconstructed” by Steve Ettlinger, and you’ll never look at an ingredient label the same way again.
I read this a few weeks ago and was going to recommend it as well. It’s pretty interesting. Amazon has it for $6 as of me posting this message.
http://www.amazon.com/Twinkie-Deconstructed-Ingredients-Processed-Manipulated/dp/B001UE7DHI/ref=sr_1_1
Thanks for the suggestion! I am always looking for “food” books in this vein (Fast Food Nation, Omnivore’s Dilemma, etc.)
I wish I had that much time to waste!!
mmm hungry
Where’s the crack cocaine?
I’d like to second the recommendation for “Twinkie, Deconstructred”.
My favorite tidbit:
According to the book, the “iron” in enriched flour can come from a number of sources, but one of them is…*drumroll*…steel mill waste products!
Apparently, when the steel is first formed, the surface layer rapidly oxidizes. This iron-oxide rust can be removed and processed, eventually ending up as food-grade iron for inclusion in enriched flour.
The Twinkie is a highly perishable product.
If you take out the various sugars and vitamins and minerals, you would have hardly any scary-sounding chemical names left.
Paleo-tards be damned, those three soy ingredients are pretty harmless too, and are common in health foods.
And I personally would prefer red coloring derived from crushed beetle shells than a petroleum product, but people have strange attitudes about bugs, and cochineal is not kosher…