Free Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger Page B

oil), fiber (for animal feed), and a gluten/starch mixture, which is then separated by bronze-colored, high-speed centrifuges. Gluten is spun off to become yet another kind of animal feed (chicken or pet food; the yellow corn pigments are what make chickens and yolks yellow), while the liquid starch, the whole point of this operation, is piped up to another level to be washed (up to fourteen times!) and, eventually, refined into all those wondrous corn syrups. (If this was a starch plant instead of a sweetener plant, it would be sent off to be dried, chemically processed, or roasted into various cornstarches. But that’s another chapter.)
    A sample of fresh, milky cornstarch pulled from a tap on a massive pipe tastes, surprisingly, not sweet at all but bland and sticky. This is the great source of sweeteners, the backbone of the soft drink industry? Hard to believe. But, alas, it’s not a sweetener yet.
    D IVIDE AND S WEETEN
    The path that brought us to this modern biorefinery, to the cutting edge of biology and chemistry and food science, to cheap and versatile sweeteners for modern soft drinks and Twinkies, began centuries ago. Reports of converting Japanese arrowroot starch to sugar date to AD 800, but the current process really began in czarist Russia. In 1811, a chemist by the name of G. S. C. Kirchoff discovered that acid hydrolysis, the process of breaking things down with acid, could be used to produce viscous, sweet syrup by heating potato starch with sulfuric acid. (Legend has it he was chasing Napoleon’s offer of a 100,000-franc prize, worth at least about $500,000 today, to anyone who could locate a native sugar source, since France was blockaded and could no longer get West Indian sugarcane—plus, he wanted to create an alternative to British sugar companies. European sugar beets are still a major, and majorly subsidized, crop, and the sugar-producing tropics remain poor, thanks to Napoleon.)
    Later, World War I and World War II both caused sugar shortages and thus inspired the North American corn sweetener industry to try harder to find alternatives to cane and beet sugar. Enter corn.
    Corn sweeteners are naturally present in cornstarch, despite the fact that it is a thick liquid that’s not at all sweet. The key is to separate the sweeteners out. When your body digests a carbohydrate, it breaks it down and absorbs the glucose (also known as blood sugar) for energy. Both your body and the corn sweetener companies do this with enzymes and hydrochloric acid—the same kinds, actually. But while your glands and organs regulate the process in your body, out in Nebraska or Illinois or Iowa, the guys in the control room are in charge.
    Put a piece of bread or a cracker on your tongue for a moment and feel it dissolve. Now substitute a seven-story-high steel vat for your mouth and thirteen computer monitors complete with colorized schematics for your glands, and you have a corn syrup plant. We are all miniature Cargills and ADMs, pulling sugar out of potatoes and corn and wheat, which is why white bread is prohibited by the South Beach Diet.
    Sucking on bread is not the kind of process one normally associates with high-tech plants, as it seems so, well, natural a process. But, in fact, Americans have been making corn syrup with enzymes instead of acid since the post–Civil War development boom (Union Sugar Company started making corn syrup in New York in 1865). The first refined version was made in 1866. Since 1967, we’ve been using enzymes to great effect, as they are very, very accurate and controllable, a big improvement over acid hydrolysis, which often generates unpredictable colors and flavors and is difficult to control.
    B REAKING U P I S …E ASY TO D O
    People in the sweetener industry are totally consumed with the concept of breaking down starch into sugars. When the nice lady at the 800 number of a megacompany that makes corn sweeteners is asked what they do there, she jumps into a long and