bogen.org

The book, Twinkie Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats by Steve Ettlinger, certainly has a certain primal draw to it, even for someone doesn’t regularly eat Twinkies.Many foods eaten by Americans these days have ingredients in them that we can barely pronounce. In most cases, even if we can pronounce the ingredient, we have no idea of the ultimate source of the same or the processes needed to transform raw material to finished product (riboflavin, anybody?). Twinkie Deconstructed documents Ettlinger’s journey to not only demystify the function of these ingredients in many products, but also their ultimate source and the processes necessary to turn them into something used by the food industry.

As his guide down the rabbit-hole of industrial food production, Ettlinger chooses the ingredient list for the humble Twinkie. The ingredient list becomes the structure of the book’s content as each ingredient gets a dedicated chapter.

Many of these chapters are quite interesting. For instance, flour is often enriched with iron to fight anemia. The iron added to flour is either microscopic flakes of a substance that is essentially rust with a better marketing program, or a substance known as ferrous sulfate. The two ultimate sources of ferrous sulfate are iron mines in northern Minnesota and petroleum from the Gulf of Mexico. The petroleum is refined in the south, where a byproduct (sulfur) is turned into sulfuric acid. That acid is then shipped north to a plant where it is used to perform a specific process on finished steel sheeting made out of that northern Minnesota iron ore. The iron/acid slurry is run through another series of processes to separate the ferrous sulfate from the acid. The ferrous sulfate is finally shipped off to be added to flour which appears in all manner of modern convenience foods.

Unfortunately, the story of most ingredients in modern processed and convenience foods is drearily similar. Something is grown and harvested; mined out of the ground; or pumped out of a well. That something is then subjected to a variety of heavy industrial processes, usually involving all manner of highly toxic substances (chlorine, acids, benzene, acetone, etc.); massive machinery; carefully controlled temperatures; miles upon miles of plumbing; and a few trips via rail car or semi. Finally, the substance is included in a food for what it brings to the taste, texture, or shelf-life of the final product.

By the seventh or eighth chapter, you almost wish for a change from that pattern, but a reprieve is not to be found and the book slides headlong into monotony.

If you’re living in a fantasy land where the ingredients for your food are all grown on farms and harvested by suntanned, hard-working farmers, this book will likely serve to provide an unwelcome window into the heart of the industrial food business. Otherwise, it’s best read as a reference book. You simply identify an ingredient on a package somewhere, find it in the index, and look up what it does and how it’s produced. Trying to read this cover to cover is otherwise a difficult and tedious task.

It’s official, Madison has gotten over 100″ of snow so far this winter.

We got 7.7″ of snow on Friday; Sunday threw another 0.7″ of snow our way. The forecast calls for 2-3″ of accumulation on Thursday. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we are completely, wholly, unreservedly, in every way, one hundred percent tired of winter.Curling season ended for me last week. My team ended up just short of the playdowns, which was disappointing, but not unexpected. We played hard, but didn’t win consistently enough to merit a spot in the playdowns. Sarah has one tournament left and then she’ll be done for the season, as well.

Two weeks ago, I attended a chainsaw safety, operation, and maintenance class offered through the Aldo Leopold Woodland School. For someone like myself who doesn’t know the first thing about chainsaws but finds himself in possession of one, the class was really interesting. The best part of the day was when we went out into the woods and practiced taking down trees. The class has four levels and I’ve finished level one. I’m hoping to find the time to get back for some of the higher levels in the course soon.

Ira was recently diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia. Sarah took him to the vet hospital where he got x-rayed, poked, prodded, and the like before he was diagnosed. Suffice it to say that he didn’t agree with any of that treatment. Now he has to be injected with antibiotics every three days until the infection clears. There is probably no member of our household who is looking forward to spring and summer more than he is.

Dalla started her any semi-annual shed-fest last week so she’s been getting regular brushing to pull out all the undercoat before she helpfully layers our furniture in dog hair. It’s best to brush her outdoors so that the wind helps blow away the undercoat. In addition, the birds like to use her surplus fur to line their nests so it doesn’t go to waste.

Last July I brewed up a batch of kölsch since it is a style of beer that pairs quite well with summer weather, activity, and food.As part of the process, I racked (transferred) the beer from the primary fermenter to a secondary fermenter after a week or two since I wanted to age the beer a bit before bottling it. In the top of the secondary fermenter, I placed a fermentation lock to exclude bacteria and the like and still offer an out for any fermentation gasses that formed in the fermenter. A fermentation lock uses water to accomplish this task. The water keeps air out of the fermenter, but lets gasses bubble out through it to relieve pressure inside the fermentation vessel.

For a variety of reasons, none of them good, I never quite got around to bottling the beer. Sometime in late October or early November, the water evaporated out of the fermentation lock. That meant that the beer was suddenly undergoing open fermentation, exposed to all the wild yeasts, bacterial, fungi and the like that were floating around my basement.

Normally, you want to avoid open fermentation when brewing because it is extremely difficult to control the taste and appearance of the final product when any random beastie floating through the air that can survive an alcoholic environment could take up residence in your brew and multiply rapidly. Faced with this problem, I punted and did nothing.

Time passed and I left for the Pole. In late January I returned and my mystery brew was still waiting for me. My sense of guilt and confusion hadn’t really lessened so I just let the mess fester.

In early March I finally got off my duff and tackled the situation head-on. If the beer was drinkable, I was determined to bottle it. If it was completely unpalatable, I’d pour the $40 of ingredients down the drain and call it an expensive lesson. I dragged the fermenter up to the kitchen, sterilized a siphon, and pulled two ounces out for a test. The beer smelled OK, even though the color was dark brown instead of a pale yellow. It was time for the big test, a taste.

I tipped the glass back and let a swallow of beer enter my mouth. The taste wasn’t bad, but the most interesting part was shortly after I swallowed the beer and my tongue went numb! A normal person might be turned off by a beer that numbs the tongue, but I forged ahead and bottled the whole batch anyway.

After two weeks of finishing in the bottle, I popped open a bottle for the big test. The bouquet was still flowery and hoppy; the appearance was still brown and cloudy. The taste…well, I was a bit letdown when it didn’t numb my tongue or anybody else’s who tried the brew. It’s extremely dry on the tongue and is actually quite an easy drinking brew. Considering all that could or should have gone wrong with the brew, I’m quite pleased that it turned out the way it did.

The brew’s name is 100 Year Kölsch for three reasons:

1. Given a hundred years, I’m not sure that I could reproduce the beer given all that happened to it as it fermented in the open for months.
2. We’re in the midst of a winter with snowfall totals that will likely take a 100 years to top.
3. Madison officially topped the 100″ mark for snowfall in this winter.

The more I hear about so-called rescue plans for distressed homeowners and banks, the madder I get.In the lastest crackpot scheme to come down the pike from Washington, our beloved Fed. chaiman Bernanke urged banks to forgive enough of the equity due on many mortgage loans so that homeowners with those loans will no longer be underwater. In many cases, that would be a forgiveness of tens of thousands of dollars.

Call me greedy, but I’d like ten to twenty thousand knocked off my mortgage, too! Where is the line for free equity forming these days? Knocking that much off my mortgage would save me thousands of dollars in interest payments over the life of the loan and give me a nice little cushion should I ever need to take out a home equity line of credit.

Why can’t I get a free mortgage principal adjustment, too? Why should I be penalized for managing my money and failing to get into debt well over my head? Hey, give me a chance! I can spend wildly and injudiciously like the best of them! Then, when I’m done, I want my Congressman to bail me out of my own misguided choices.

The bailout of greedy banks and stupid borrowers (or is it greedy borrowers and stupid banks) just makes my blood boil. How dumb did you have to be to believe that housing prices would continue their stratospheric climb forever? Did anyone actually believe that we’re in a new economic paradigm? Time and time again research has shown that there is no such thing. But somehow, someway, people always believe that this time things will be different.

Maybe these millions of borrowers assumed that they would all hit the lottery if they ran into trouble with their mortgage? Well, they were right. They were playing the Congressional Lottery, however, and not Powerball. And, just like any other Lottery, you can’t win if you’re not playing.