Twinkie ingredients, lovingly photographed

From wheat flour to Red #40, photographer Dwight Eschliman takes surprisingly compelling photographs of every ingredient in a Twinkie.

What you're looking at here is monoglyceride—an emulsifier that helps blend usually not-easily-blendible ingredients. If you've ever made your own vinaigrette, you're already familiar with the concept. Oil and vinegar don't want to join up, and separate into layers when you pour them together. But, whisk in some honey, and you've got yourself a blended oil-and-vinegar dressing. The honey (or mustard. yum.) acts as an emulsifier.

There's not much info like this on Eschliman's Web site, but you can read more about several of the ingredients he photographed in this Planet Green slideshow.

For the record, I'm posting this more out of fascination than anti-Twinkie sentiment. From what I understand about heavily processed foods, such as the Twinkie, they aren't inherently deadly objects. The issue is more about the way cheap ingredients make sweet treats so inexpensive that we can afford to eat way, way too much of them. But the ingredients themselves fail to inspire a lot of fear in me. It's more just a matter of knowing that Twinkies (or, in my preference, frozen Zebra Cakes) are a (very) sometimes food.

Via Sarah Henning

Photo taken by Dwight Eschliman.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

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dculberson

Zebra cakes! I haven’t had one of those in a decade. I used to have one every day or two with a glass of milk when I was a kid. I tried one as an adult and just couldn’t handle the sugar.
Anonymous

Very nice.

The one that got me was this:
http://www.eschlimanphoto.com/twinkie/lib/img/twinkie/ingredients/13.jpg

“Whole Eggs”
apoxia

I’m really going to have to hunt down a Twinkie next time I’m in the US. I somewhat tried the last two times, but I’ve still never eaten one. My favourite ingredient in that list is red #40 – what a gorgeous colour.
bmcraec

Great article, thanks Maggie! And, the emulsification properties of both honey & mustard form the core of our house salad dressing, which is one of those miraculous maker moments in the kitchen. Honey & (Dijon, preferably) mustard blended together become mysteriously runnier than either of the two. Adding raspberry vinegar and extra virgin olive oil (all ingredients in roughly equal proportions), then shaking like hell, produces a really smooth dressing that goes well with many, many flavours, and seems to never separate in the fridge.

Oversharing? I hope not. Try it out and see for yourself.
SenorPaco

It’s probably because I work as a food technologist, but this photo set is total FoodPorn.

(Although I perfer shots of the more sultry liquid lecithin.)
- mst3kmoxie
  
  The Frozen Zebra Cakes? That gives me a great idea to try frozen Zingers…. now THAT’S the snack cake that’s like crack to me.
  
  And SenorPaco? As a fellow FoodPorn addict, you need to hook me up with some shots of liquid lecithin. ;-)
zikman

FROZEN zebra cakes? I think you just blew my mind.
- mdh
  
  He blew my mind at adding honey to oil and vinegar as an emulsifier. The Frozen Zebra Cake thing is just icing.
Rider

http://www.amazon.com/Twinkie-Deconstructed-Ingredients-Processed-Manipulated/dp/B001UE7DHI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1282020143&sr=8-1

A must read gets a little boring but demystifies the ingredients you see all the time.
blueelm

This is totally fascinating to me. It’s interesting to imagine these things coming together to make a snack cake.

Personally I’m not a fan of Twinkies but that’s only because I’m trying not to eat hundreds of calories of snack cakes!
Anonymous

When I eat one of those oil “cream” based snacks it is so rare that I do that I feel like I’m doing something incredibly indulgent and naughty.

That said those cakes tend to sit on shelves so long that there is a noticable difference between a fresh one and an old one. There is a definate staleness you can detect.
Nadreck

The great thing about Twinkies is that they don’t have a shelf life: they’ll last longer than the shelf! I’ve heard of people eating ones, with intact wrappers mind you, that were found in 50s backyard bomb-shelters with no ill effects. There is nothing in nature that can affect Twinkie molecules in any meaningful way.
- mykie
  
  Not true, there is fat in Twinkies and therefore subject to rancidity and therefore spoilage. The actual shelf life of a Twinkie is about 25 days, though I’ve personally witnessed Twinkie’s lasting upto a year (and were inedible at that point).
  
  http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/twinkies.asp
  
  What freaks me out is the inclusion of “Animal shortening”, which essentially means lard…guess i can scratch Twinkies off the list of vegetarian-friendly snacks!
  - Lady Katey
    
    I’ve read the Twinkie Deconstructed book linked to above, and the author says that the current shelf life for Twinkies is 3 months.
    
    When they first were made (with real butter and real eggs and real cream in the filling) they only lasted 3 days.
    - michael holloway
      
      Nice.
Anonymous

More information on Twinkie ingredient SSL (a very similar emulsifier): http://www.docstoc.com/docs/33668507/Sodium-Stearoyl-Lactylate
Anonymous

The photographer could have saved himself some work if he knew anything about chemistry. #14 (Dextrose) and #17 (Glucose) are the same chemical.
- tuckels
  
  Dextrose is a specific structure of Glucose.
  Compare : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Glucose_structure.svg (Dextrose) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:L-Glucose_structure.svg (L-Glucose)
- michael holloway
  
  #14 (Dextrose) and #17 (Glucose) are not the same thing.
  
  When helping my father live with type 2 diabetes we had to understand the differences in sugars. Some are metabolized by the body very quickly, some very slowly. For a diabetic you have to plan out where you want the blood sugar levels to be at a point in the future; very interesting stuff.
  
  I recommend “Don’t Spill the Sugar:
  A Diabetic’s Companion”
  by Joseph Pilarski and Eugenio Angueira
  
  At Google Books:
  http://books.google.com/books?sitesec=reviews&id=3vU1AAAACAAJ
Anonymous

Great! I love stuff like this :)
Tweeker

It’d be interesting to see photographs containing the relative quantities of each item in them.