Twinkie, Deconstructed (4 page)

The place is easier to get into if you’re driving a sixteen-wheeler than if you happen to be in an old Ford Taurus station wagon. I have to steer carefully, skirting the trucks and their giant loading bays, way to the side and around out back, to find my way to the office. The grain—the talent, if you will—is escorted briskly back.

The mill is full of noisy rooms spread among several tall buildings. The wheat berries travel through a wide variety of machines, including separators (sticks and stones may break your mill); aspirators (to suck up dust and dirt); a scourer (to get some roughage—outer husks—and more dirt off ); a washer-stoner (to remove more dirt and stones); a few seed separators; then water-filled tempering bins to soften the inner part (the endosperm, the source of flour) and toughen the outer part (the bran) for easier separation; and finally, as many as twelve steps just for grinding and sifting. This is not a simple process, though no chemicals are involved.

The room full of roller milling machines looks somewhat like a Laundromat gone wild. The machines—disarmingly small, waist-high, and three to six feet wide—are lined neatly in long rows; metal and plastic pneumatic tubes veer off the tops every which way, constantly circulating and recirculating the flour until it is ground just right. Resistance is futile. Big mills like this one often have fifty or sixty milling machines; smaller ones only twenty.

These are precision instruments, and the best are manufactured in Switzerland. Each machine has a little, laptop-like control panel and a long, clear plastic lid that the technicians can lift for sampling. The rollers—a pair to each milling machine—are narrow, grooved, and cooled stainless steel rods that spin in a noisy whir. One moves a bit faster than the other, producing a shearing action where the berry or part of a berry is caught between them, breaking the center (endosperm) from the exterior (bran), and giving this first device the name “breaker mill.”

The few guys wandering out from the control room wear ear protectors. A thin coat of white dust graces the floor, softening the angles of the machines throughout the mill. The air/flour mixture flows like water, sending the acceptable grains on and the larger ones back for another grind through what amounts to thousands of hissing tubes that crisscross the plant. In just one small, three-foot square, I count eight tubes passing through the floor. The triage is constant, the flow is continuous, and the dust vacuums hum loudly.

No one smokes in a flour mill—flour dust, like any organic (carbon-based) dust, is explosive. Add a tiny spark from a motor, static electricity, or worse, a welding torch, and
kaBOOM
! (As a result, all repairs are done when the plant is “down.”)

The same danger is especially high where other crops with carbohydrates in them are milled or processed: cocoa, cotton, sugar, and, of course, wood. Other explosive foods are custard powder, instant coffee, dried milk, potato powder, and soup powder. Even metal dusts can explode. It is hard to imagine that these simple and common products, lurking on our shelves as we sleep, are capable of blowing their processing plants to smithereens.

Every point where flour dust could escape is designed to minimize the risk of explosion. Vacuums are the first line of defense, and some areas feature negative air pressure, so dust clouds can’t form. The doors close and seal tightly to maintain high air pressure, and casual visitors are unwelcome (I’m personally guided and wearing a bright red, color-coded hard hat indicating my security clearance).

Other than Alexander and me, there seem to be only a few technicians in the plant. This is one of the most automated of professions—the first fully automated manufacturing process in history, industry organizations are fond of boasting—and it seems appropriate, this modern melding of industry and agriculture. Flour is one of the very basic foodstuffs. It is the primary ingredient in the staff of life as well as the stuff of Twinkies. But there is a lot more to cake flour than just ground-up grass, probably a lot more than you ever imagined. Before it can be shipped out, it requires the addition of bleach (yes, bleach) and vitamins, both of which are completely industrial products, in stark contrast to their natural, grassy partner.

CHAPTER 3

Bleach

W
hen my kids ask me if the same bleach we use on our laundry is used to bleach flour, I have to say, “Well, yes, sort of. Eeewwww” is the studied (and, let’s face it, expected) response. Household bleach and flour bleach share the same essential ingredient—chlorine. That must mean that Twinkie flour—that nice, clean, familiar cake flour—is then bleached with poisonous chlorine gas. But don’t worry, it’s OK to eat (we think). It’s just hard to see where it’s made. To make chlorine for bleaching cake flour or disinfecting water or making plastic pipes, you need just two raw ingredients: tons of salt and a whole lot of electricity. And both salt and hydroelectric power are found in abundance around Niagara Falls, New York.

The chloralkali, or chlor/alkali, industry—that’s the term for chlorine makers—is one of the largest industries in the world, and chlorine is the tenth most common chemical made in the United States, so a lot of companies should be making chlorine up there, and were, until a few years ago. One would think it would be easy to find a few giant chlorine companies, but many of the people in the flour industry who use it are unable to say where it is made or by whom. It turns out that most have gone out of business (strange, given that chlorine is such a commonly used chemical) or have merged into various conglomerates (alas, not as strange). Many were victims, to be sure, of bad management, but safety and other government regulations have no doubt taken their toll on the smaller players.

I did find two very helpful companies, though. Nearly a hundred years ago, predecessors of what is now OxyChem
^®
, Occidental Petroleum Corporation’s chemical subsidiary, the largest merchant marketer of chlorine in the United States, located what is now one of its biggest plants in the previously mentioned area of Niagara Falls, New York. PPG Industries, formerly Pittsburgh Plate Glass, has one across the nearby border, in Beauharnois, near Montreal, and several on the Gulf Coast, notably Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Beaumont, Texas. These plants either sit directly atop salt deposits (as in the Gulf Coast, where most of our chlorine is now produced) or next to inexpensive hydropower (Quebec). Chlorine industry spokespeople claim that they use 1 percent of the electricity generated in the United States, to make approximately 26
billion
pounds of chlorine each year. They also say that they use 44 billion pounds of table salt to do this, enough to cover, in one of the more imaginative metaphors ever conceived, almost three hundred large orders of french fries for each American, every day.

The term “chloralkali” is deeply rooted in language, not science. The word “chlorine” itself comes from Greek for “greenish yellow,” a name chosen by British chemist Sir Humphry Davy in 1810, when he determined that chlorine was an element. (It had first been isolated thirty-six years earlier, in 1774, by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele.) The root of the word “alkali” is
alqili
, which is Arabic for “plant ashes,” the source of what has been known since antiquity as the common household alkali chemical lye—sodium or potassium hydroxide. The ancient recipe is simply thoroughly washed plant ashes (though “lye” is from Latin for “wash,” it is not a stretch to suggest that it might come from the last syllable of that Arabic word as well).

S
EPARATING
S
ALT

Finding the chlorine companies might have been a bit difficult, but getting inside them proved impossible. Normally, no one can casually visit a chlorine plant, not even a food or science writer, nor (presumably) any potential terrorists. The intricacies of chlorine manufacturing are complicated by the fact that this is a secretive industry, for national security as well as for competitive reasons, in addition to the fact that chlorine is seriously toxic.

Despite having befriended some helpful employees who strived to get me in (my high-management level OxyChem contact—let’s call him Pedro Gonzales—tried hard; others were candidly pessimistic), no dice. Typically the companies offer only general scientific information. You won’t find many glorious pictures of their plants on their Web sites or in their annual reports, but part of the reason for that is also because the equipment is quite prosaic. Most sites feature a combination of boxy steel buildings surrounded by refinery-like towers, a web of pipes, and busy railroad sidings. Terry Smith, Director of Technology for PPG Industries, chuckles as he points out the chlorine building at one big chemical plant (full of intimidating towers and pipes that I hoped were for making the gas) as the one building that looks exactly like every nondescript warehouse in the world—a plain old box. Even their industry association is vague on details. The plants can be especially dangerous—that’s the national security deal—because chlorine gas is absolutely deadly, which is why it and other toxic gases were used in World War I to fill the trenches and kill masses of soldiers. The results were so awful that the use of any gas as a weapon, including chlorine, was banned by the Geneva Conventions and the more recent Chemical Weapons Convention. Lucky for us and for Twinkies, chlorine is only part of a minor chemical reaction in cake flour, not an ingredient you ingest. But still.

From what I’m told by Smith and other industry experts, you can’t smell any chlorine in the plant, which is not only reassuring but almost astounding: it’s detectable by the human nose at only one part per million (1 ppm). Gonzales tells me you can smell more bleach in your laundry room than in a chlorine plant, which, of course, begs the question, “Why?” Smith explains, with an engineer’s stoicism, “You don’t want to release any chlorine. We just don’t allow it. You design for that.” What that means, among other things, is that if the plant should experience a power interruption, the cells shut down and the scrubbers absorb chlorine into the caustic soda also made there, which instantly creates something akin to household bleach. Gonzales is proud to point out that this also means that working in some chlorine plants is safer, by OSHA standards, than working in a commercial bank. Pick your poison.

My son’s chemistry class began exploring the periodic table as I began writing this chapter, and his teacher referenced chlorine as an example of an element easily found at home—which is true, just not in pure form. Chlorine may be one of the twelve most common elements in the earth, but it is always found naturally combined with something else, like sodium, with which it forms salt (sodium chloride, or NaCl). These days chlorine is made by releasing it from salt in an electrochemical reaction called electrolysis, the one first envisioned by the English chemist Michael Faraday in his early experiments with electricity in the mid-1800s and often studied or demonstrated in chemistry classrooms. The modern, current form of electrolysis—which coincidently makes sodium hydroxide—became the norm for chlorine production only when electricity became available to industry. The first plant to use it, in 1893, was in Rumford, Maine.

At a typical plant—and, for homeland security reasons, I have been asked to not specifically identify one—the brine (concentrated salt water) is pumped into fiberglass and/or titanium electrochemical cells in a room the size of a typical high school gymnasium. Each cell, and there may be up to a hundred in a room, appears to be about the size of a couple of good-size deep freezers, about eight feet long by four feet wide and high. The room holds a daunting maze of hundreds of brine pipes and electrical conduits laid out flat, in a kind of rectangular city. Two thick copper bars carry massive amounts of current to electrodes in each cell’s side, and various pipes and tubes channel a continuous supply of salt water. The cells seem happy enough with their plight: they hum as they work.

It may be simple chemistry, but it’s still a little dangerous. It starts with a tank of salt water and a strong electrical current, which causes the chlorine to separate from the sodium in the salt and gather at one side, while the hydrogen separates from the oxygen in the water and scurries to the other side, a bit like two boxers after the bell rings. What’s left behind is sodium hydroxide, also known as caustic soda, which plays an important role in making at least seven Twinkie ingredients common among all processed foods, including sodium caseinate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, artificial colors, corn flour, soybean oil, vegetable shortening, and soy protein isolate. Whether or not you can pronounce ’em, it’s all in the family.

The two gases, chlorine and hydrogen,
2
are carefully kept apart for good reason. If they were to be exposed to sunlight together in just the right conditions, they could explode.

P
IPES AND
C
AKE

The elemental chlorine, Cl
₂
, is piped out as a greenish yellow gas, which is further purified, compressed, and liquefied at extreme subzero temperatures. Most plants use the bulk of it right there to make other things, like vinyl siding or plastic pipe, aka PVC (polyvinylchloride), a far cry from bread and cake, or so you thought. The rest is often just piped directly into pressurized, extra-secure train cars or neighboring chemical plants. Astonishingly important, chlorine is essential to about half of all chemicals made by the chemical industry, and about 85 percent of all pharmaceuticals. It is used to purify about 98 percent of our drinking water, too (and to keep our swimming pools clean). On top of all this, chlorine plays a common, useful, and helpful role in our daily diet.

When it comes to flour, fresher is not better. In fact, for centuries, freshly milled flour was stored for a few months in order to allow for natural oxidation before it was sold. Oxidation whitened the flour, which starts out a creamy yellow thanks to the natural yellow-orange carotenoid pigments found in wheat—the source of the image “amber waves of grain.” By the late 1800s, consumers had started paying higher prices for whiter flour. Manufacturers responded, naturally, by looking for more efficient, less costly ways to meet that demand (time is money).