Free Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger Page A
Authors: Steve Ettlinger
snack cakes), the demand for corn is huge. An astonishing eight of Twinkies’ thirty-nine ingredients are made directly from corn—more than from any other single raw material (soybeans are its closest rival, but with only three). If any food symbolizes the almost unimaginably immense corporate agribusiness, corn, the amazing grain, is it.
Nestled in a slight dip in the rolling hills along the Missouri River a few miles southeast of Blair, Nebraska, is a fine example of corporate synergy. There the multinational food giant Cargill (124,000 employees and $71 billion in sales), dubbed the largest privately held company in the United States by Forbes magazine (some say the world), has created an industrial campus with a handful of client/partner companies, all of which use something from Cargill’s wet-milling corn-processing plant.
W ET M ILLING ON THE M ISSOURI
Tall smokestacks spouting clean clouds of water vapor; tank farms; and stark white silos define the skyline. The verticality of these narrow cylindrical forms is offset by boxy, beige, generally nondescript steel buildings. The whole place is surrounded by lines of giant tanker and grain trucks, as well as by black and white tanker railcars on rail sidings. About 175,000 bushels of yellow #2 dent field corn, the national standard commercial crop, arrive at Cargill’s plant every day of the year—that’s more than 60 million a year—via an endless line of grain trucks, each sporting giant udders of corn waiting to be relieved. The line snakes slowly down a gentle slope from the highway, called the Lewis and Clark Trail, along the western bank of the Missouri River. A sweet, syrupy smell pervades the air.
Cargill can talk all it wants about the plastics, fuel alcohols, and amino acids that it makes from corn, but the Big Daddy, what brings me to what Cargill calls a biorefinery, is corn syrup, including the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup that so fascinates my son.
This is no run-of-the-mill mill. It’s a complex refinery, and the manager, Eric D. Johnson, is a vice president. After a forty-five-minute PowerPoint presentation in a conference room that would easily hold thirty, we take off on a tour. Every door we encounter in the plant is accessed only by a preauthorized card-key entry. “Industrial espionage” is the explanation offered, and it is why I won’t be shown every part of the plant, nor any specialized processing.
Welcome to Blair, Nebraska, a place not known for its gentle climate. Signs pointing to “severe weather shelter” areas are posted in most stairways. Rooftop pipes, insulated and jacketed with sheet metal, are totally pockmarked with deep craters made by hailstones. It’s no wonder that one of the buildings on Main Street houses a construction company whose oversize rooftop sign proclaims it a “hail damage specialist.” Local car dealerships often lose entire inventories to hail. Luckily, it is a sunny day when I visit.
The first tanks the corn hits after being unloaded, the “steep” tanks, are so massive that you sense rather than see them, like the walls of a skyscraper when viewed from the sidewalk. Climbing harnesses hang by nearby ladders. Each tank, about seven stories high, holds about forty thousand bushels of corn, hot water, and a bit of 0.1 percent solution sulfur dioxide—and there is a gymnasium-size roomful of them. The corn soaks here for a day or two in order to weaken the protein, so that it releases the starch when the kernel gets milled. Amazingly, the steep water is not a waste product but is so nutrient-rich that it becomes a fermentation base for chemicals such as citric acid and amino acids, medicines such as penicillin, and a source of animal feed products.
The loudest room, on a higher floor, is a loft full of motors atop milling vessels—plain, squat, covered vats the size of trucks, where the newly softened corn kernels are wet-milled, or ground up, then physically separated into germ (for
Nestled in a slight dip in the rolling hills along the Missouri River a few miles southeast of Blair, Nebraska, is a fine example of corporate synergy. There the multinational food giant Cargill (124,000 employees and $71 billion in sales), dubbed the largest privately held company in the United States by Forbes magazine (some say the world), has created an industrial campus with a handful of client/partner companies, all of which use something from Cargill’s wet-milling corn-processing plant.
W ET M ILLING ON THE M ISSOURI
Tall smokestacks spouting clean clouds of water vapor; tank farms; and stark white silos define the skyline. The verticality of these narrow cylindrical forms is offset by boxy, beige, generally nondescript steel buildings. The whole place is surrounded by lines of giant tanker and grain trucks, as well as by black and white tanker railcars on rail sidings. About 175,000 bushels of yellow #2 dent field corn, the national standard commercial crop, arrive at Cargill’s plant every day of the year—that’s more than 60 million a year—via an endless line of grain trucks, each sporting giant udders of corn waiting to be relieved. The line snakes slowly down a gentle slope from the highway, called the Lewis and Clark Trail, along the western bank of the Missouri River. A sweet, syrupy smell pervades the air.
Cargill can talk all it wants about the plastics, fuel alcohols, and amino acids that it makes from corn, but the Big Daddy, what brings me to what Cargill calls a biorefinery, is corn syrup, including the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup that so fascinates my son.
This is no run-of-the-mill mill. It’s a complex refinery, and the manager, Eric D. Johnson, is a vice president. After a forty-five-minute PowerPoint presentation in a conference room that would easily hold thirty, we take off on a tour. Every door we encounter in the plant is accessed only by a preauthorized card-key entry. “Industrial espionage” is the explanation offered, and it is why I won’t be shown every part of the plant, nor any specialized processing.
Welcome to Blair, Nebraska, a place not known for its gentle climate. Signs pointing to “severe weather shelter” areas are posted in most stairways. Rooftop pipes, insulated and jacketed with sheet metal, are totally pockmarked with deep craters made by hailstones. It’s no wonder that one of the buildings on Main Street houses a construction company whose oversize rooftop sign proclaims it a “hail damage specialist.” Local car dealerships often lose entire inventories to hail. Luckily, it is a sunny day when I visit.
The first tanks the corn hits after being unloaded, the “steep” tanks, are so massive that you sense rather than see them, like the walls of a skyscraper when viewed from the sidewalk. Climbing harnesses hang by nearby ladders. Each tank, about seven stories high, holds about forty thousand bushels of corn, hot water, and a bit of 0.1 percent solution sulfur dioxide—and there is a gymnasium-size roomful of them. The corn soaks here for a day or two in order to weaken the protein, so that it releases the starch when the kernel gets milled. Amazingly, the steep water is not a waste product but is so nutrient-rich that it becomes a fermentation base for chemicals such as citric acid and amino acids, medicines such as penicillin, and a source of animal feed products.
The loudest room, on a higher floor, is a loft full of motors atop milling vessels—plain, squat, covered vats the size of trucks, where the newly softened corn kernels are wet-milled, or ground up, then physically separated into germ (for