Free Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger

into a hopper under the car or by being sucked out with fat pneumatic hoses. The bakery conveys it to climate-controlled silos—some of which hold as much as 200,000 pounds—and augurs it over to the bakery in an enclosed (and very dry) conveyor.
    Liquid sugar for the filling is delivered by tanker truck 45,000 pounds at a time. And then it’s mix, mix, mix—or more accurately, cream, cream, cream—until that shortening is smoothed out and the sugar can start working its many wonders, literally from start to finish.
    Refined sugar is pure. Refining it is nothing more than purifying a natural food, McElvaney likes to remind me, a process of separation and removal, not transformation. In sweet contrast to the corn sweeteners that compete for our affection, not one molecule is changed.

CHAPTER 6
    Corn Sweeteners
    M aybe the small lighthouse perched on the Mississippi River levee in Clinton, Iowa, looks a little out of place, but what sounds like a Boeing 747 revving its engine for immediate takeoff is what’s startling. The screaming, industrial roar of pure muscle comes from what appears to be a small factory working its way down the river, but is, in fact, a four-story-high, rectangular, white steel tugboat maneuvering a football field–size collection of barges through the strong currents, barely missing the bridge pylons.
    This is an everyday occurrence along the river in Iowa and Illinois, where tugs and barges bring thousands of tons of corn to the major plants for processing, including one of Archer Daniels Midland’s (ADM), which is close to a mile long. It is served by ADM’s barges, ADM’S towboat, and ADM’s docks. One barge can hold the equivalent of fifty-two trucks; some towboats lash together as many as twenty barges at a time. A group, called a tow, can be a thousand feet long, just 10 percent short of matching the largest ocean liner ever built, the Queen Mary 2 . Call it a river liner instead, and note that it carries corn, not caviar.
    This plant, made up of dozens of buildings, steam plumes streaming from their stacks and towers, and ringed by railway sidings loaded with freight cars, used to be the Clinton Corn Processing Company, where high fructose corn syrup was first mass-produced in 1967. Most of our food comes from places like this, because most of our food can be traced back to corn, whether to feed cattle or to make sweeteners for foods ranging from ketchup to Twinkies.
    In Sydney, on the other side of Iowa, the soil is as good as you can get for growing corn, so loose, soft, and rich in the early spring you can just plunge your hands into it. As such, the land is so valuable that it is farmed right up to the road’s edge, much like the vineyards in France. Most corn is grown on family-owned farms, according to central Illinois farmer Leon Corzine, whose family has done just that for six generations.
    Thanks to science and technology, Corzine’s generation farms far more efficiently than generations past. Modern farming techniques, including specialized fertilizers, pesticides, and high-tech combines, not to mention doing less versus more (like leaving the “trash” of stems and leaves on the surface, and not tilling the soil), are actually enabling farmers to build topsoil after losing it for many years. Corzine, who is active in farm lobbying organizations, thinks that this Midwestern farmland is the most productive land in the world.
    No farm is very far from a group of silos. An estimated 80 million acres of cornfields cover about 125,000 square miles in the United States. The all-time record harvest—almost 12 billion bushels—was recorded in 2004. 7 ADM, the world’s largest corn processor, handles 9.5 acres’ worth of corn every minute, every day. Most goes to feed animals, but with as many as six hundred products derived from corn and used in products ranging from auto fuel to pharmaceuticals, plastic fibers to industrial starches (and, lest we forget, sweet drinks and