The Many Ingredients of a Twinkie

Way back when in my post about Michael Pollan's "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." mantra, I mentioned the idea of staying away from foods with more than five ingredients. That's much harder to do when you're eating highly processed foods (which is the point). That way you tend to me avoiding chemicals and getting real, whole nutrients. Plus, as mentioned in Process Food Land: Adventures in More Questionable Marketing, when you're eating processed food you have to look out for things like products that appear to have blueberries in them until you read the label and find out your eating a piece of blue-dyed starch.


When it comes to Twinkies though, both these concepts get yanked even further. There's no way you're expecting to eat any real whole food when you eat a Twinkie (which, by the way, I haven't done in at least 15 years). They're made without any real dairy products that could spoil quickly. According to a 75th anniversary of the Twinkie article in The Washington Post, "Twinkies are basically flour, sugar (three kinds of it), oil, eggs and chemicals (mainly preservatives and stabilizers)." 

FD&C Yellow #5 from Dwight Eschliman's 37 or Ingredients

So why this Twinkie interest all of a sudden? Through the website Good.is, I discovered Dwight Eschliman's 37 or So Ingredients - a project in which Eschliman photographed various Twinkie ingredients. I previously didn't even know what some of these ingredients would look like. According to Good, his mom kept him away from processed food, meat and dairy. When he got older though he discovered foods like the Twinkie, but by the time he had kids of his own, found his skepticism of these kinds of foods renewed. 


Feel free to check the project out as see what a lump of animal shortening looks like. Yeah, that's right... a Twinkie's not necessarily vegetarian. 


©2011 Memo To My Health. Please do not republish our written content without notifying us and getting permission.