Flutterby™! : Twinkie, Deconstructed

In talking about his father losing his house in the recent SoCal fires, Dave Goodman also had a mention of his stepmother getting injured in the 1980s L-Tryptophan fiasco, and linked to Organic Consumer's Association: Looking Back at Genetic Engineering's First Deadly Disaster: L-tryptophan.

Which brings me to Twinkie, Deconstructed. The table of contents is the ingredients list of the Twinkie snack cake, and Steve Ettlinger leads the reader through his quest to discover the source of each of these, from visiting refineries in Delaware to gypsum mines in Oklahoma, describing niacin factories in Switzerland and vats of yeasts producing riboflavin along the Yangtze. It left me wanting more information, which is good, I suppose, and it left me with a general unease about my food supply.

I think that's a good thing. Maybe it's just that we're in the midst of trying to figure out the extent of the melamine scandal, but in light of some of the difficulties and deliberate obfuscations Charlene and I have found in looking at vitamin supply chains, I'm not at all at ease with the notion that large portions of my food supply are as unlike "food" as this book suggests (and I've no reason to dis-believe).

Recommended, especially if you need more urging to eat things that you can recognize how they came into being from sources that you know and trust.