Urban legend has long deemed Twinkies the cockroaches of the snack food world, a treat that can survive for decades, what humanity would have left to eat come the apocalypse. The true shelf life - which used to be 25 days - seems somewhat less impressive by comparison.
While the Twinkie is indeed a highly processed food - its three dozen or so ingredients include polysorbate 60, sodium stearoyl lactylate and others that could only come from a lab - it isn't any more so than thousands of other food products out there.
So why does the Twinkie persist in the popular imagination as a paragon of delicious, unnatural food creations? Perhaps it is the way the snacks seem to override our senses. Unwrapped from their plastic packaging, these sponge cakes appear impossibly soft, their filling so creamy - not rancid, as logic tells us that any milk product left out for days must surely be.
Indeed, most of the items on Twinkies' long list of ingredients go into pulling off that hat trick. Normally, you need butter, milk and eggs to give cakes their moisture and tenderness. But butter, milk and eggs spoil, so Twinkies needed a way to defy the laws of baked-good longevity. That job is filled by ingredients like monoglycerides and diglycerides, emulsifiers - also found in real milk - that love to bind with oil, and sodium stearoyl lactylate, which likes to bind with water.
The butter flavor comes from diacetyl, the same compound food scientists use in microwave popcorn and "buttery" chardonnays.
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Twinkies are indeed an engineered food, but let's not be absurd. Diacetyl occurs naturally in butter; mono and di glycerides are also naturally occurring fats (MCT oil, for example). Some ingredients (like stearoyl lactylate) are really lab products although that doesn't -necessarily - make them bad. The biggest problematic ingredients are HFCS and hydrogenated fats, though there are others. All that said, keep some perspective. A twinkie or two once in a while won't hurt you. Ten a day for decades is a really bad idea; even one a day suggests you might want a better diet. Add chocolate chip cookies!
ReplyDeleteI knew a chemical engineer who retired from the Navy and went to work at a food ingredients plant that used diacetyl. He told me: "Never, ever, eat butter flavored microwave popcorn".
ReplyDeleteI had some Twinkies I put back in 1999 that I overlooked....they were actually pretty good about a year ago.
ReplyDeleteSlightly dry, but very edible.