Steve Ettlinger, editor, book producer and author came to ULM last Wednesday to talk about his latest book, “Twinkie, Deconstructed.”

Ettlinger got the idea from  reading and finding out about ingredients. He was also inspired one day when he gave his kids ice cream, and read the ingredients. “My daughter asked me what polysorbate 60 was, and I wanted to know, too,” he said.

He chose the Twinkie because the ingredient list was unusually long. “It’s basically a cake but the ingredients in it are strange,” Ettlinger said .

Ettlinger talked about the many places he went to in his search for the common ingredients in Twinkies. Most of them were plants and mines where we get the ingredients to make things like baking powder, which are located in mines across the Midwest.

Although baking powder is very common in most foods, it is where it comes from that is so odd. “It is ironic that baking powder makes cakes fluffy because the ingredients come from rocks,” said Ettlinger.

“The sodium carbonate that is used in baking powder is also used to help cattle that eat grain because they get indigestion,” he said.

Ettlinger also talked about many other ingredients like fructose corn syrup and lactic acid. “Lactic acid is a common food product that can be made from corn when used in food.” Lactic acid is commonly found in dairy products, but when used as a food additive, it mostly comes from corn, just like corn syrup.

Yuri Fujita, a freshman education major from Japan, liked Ettlinger’s scientific approach to the Twinkie.

“I did not know about Twinkies until I came to the US,” said Fujita. “Learning about the process of the ingredients was interesting to me.”

“Learning about this has me questioning what is healthy, and from now on I will read the labels of what I eat,” said Fujita. “I think college students are more informed now than 10 years ago,” Ettlinger said. “We have more tools available now for cooking.”

Ettlinger also said Twinkies are not terrible foods; they are a “treat” we should eat sparingly and we should have a “healthy skepticism” when it comes to food.

For more information about Steve Ettlinger and his book, you can visit his website,
www.twinkiedeconstructed.com.