UNCORRECTED PROOF!   NEITHER COPYEDITED NOR PROOFREAD!!!!!

DO NOT QUOTE FROM THIS MATERIAL!

NOT FOR REPRODUCTION!

EXCERPT from Introduction

Chapter 1

Where Does Polysorbate 60 Come from, Daddy?

It all came to a head as I was sitting at a picnic table near the beach in Connecticut one fine August day, feeding my two little kids ice cream bars and, out of habit, casually reading the ingredient label. 

“Whatcha reading, Daddy?” my six-year-old girl asked.  “Uh, the ingredient label, honey.  It tells us what’s inside your ice cream bar.”  Oops.  Slippery slope.  Glancing back down at it, I realized it was totally incomprehensible and most terms, only barely pronounceable.

“So what’s in it, Dad?” asked my son, a big sixth grader, who started reading his own label aloud.  “Oooooh--high fructose corn syrup!  What’s that?  And what’s pol-y-sor-bate-six-tee?” 

I started to sweat.

And then my sweet little girl, (who at that age still thought Daddy knew everything) pitched the zinger: “Where does pol-y-sor-bate six-tee come from, Daddy?”

It was a moment of truth that every parent recognizes. When you must admit your fallibility to your worshipful children.

“Uhh.....umm....I uh....don’t have a clue, honey,” was the rather disappointing—but honest—answer I mustered. Some father I was!  I could speak with a fair amount of authority about Greek olives, Spanish clementines, and tuna fish.  But when faced with high fructose corn syrup, I was lost.

Being a curious, food-loving guy, I actually began to think about the question more seriously.  I’d always wondered what those strange-sounding ingredients were as I read labels purely out of habit, going through the motions without ever understanding or even gaining any knowledge.  Then and there, I decided to put an end to the mystery and find out.  I had to find the polysorbate . . . tree or wherever it came from. 

* * * *

    Thinking about the origins of food is not new to me.  I lived in France for six years and learned how the origin and handling of wine grapes affected how the wine tasted.  I visited the actual villages that Beaujolais Villages comes from.  I ate at restaurants featuring regional food—not just regional cuisine, but regional food.  Ditto cheese or fruit or vegetables, often bought directly from the farmer at his or her farm.  Now I spend most of my summers on the coast of Maine, where I often gather mussels from the nearby shore and cook them for dinner mere hours later, often accompanied by fish (mackerel) we’ve caught and vegetables we’ve harvested or received from a neighbor’s garden. 

When you eat mussels or blueberries that you have collected yourself, or a vegetable you or a neighbor has grown, you don’t have to guess at where your food came from.  You are consuming it as close as possible to the point of origin, reducing processing to an absolute minimum.  Eat your own vegetables and fruits raw, and you’ve reduced “processing” to washing.  Eating wild raspberries from your own yard as you pick them is about as short a link to a food source as you can get—a luscious treat, and the absolute polar opposite of modern processed food.  My kids don’t ask me where these berries come from—they can see for themselves.  At the other extreme, the point of processed food is to have no direct link to a place, or even to time.  Processed food is meant to be national or even international, and the longer it remains ready for consumption, the better. It’s been this way since people started salting, drying, or smoking their food, centuries ago. 

I know from working as an assistant chef, eating at fine restaurants from time to time, and having done a few food-related books, that intriguing stories accompany many foods, stories that often deal with their origins and processing, like why some beers taste bitter while others taste malty.  One glorious night a number of years ago, I was treated to a custom tasting menu by one of the best chefs in the world, Grey Kunz, at his legendary four-star restaurant, Lespinasse, in anticipation of a book project we were contemplating.  One dish featured a mysterious, red, tart sauce, and in order to explain what it was made of, Chef Kunz sent out a tuxedoed waiter carrying an immense silver platter lined with sumptuous white linen upon which gently rested a little branch full of red fruit.  "Mr. Kunz wanted you to see the source of this sauce--rose hips," the waiter explained. 

That fateful day on the beach with my kids inspired me to do the same for Red No. 40, polysorbate 60, and mono and diglycerides.  However, since I lack tuxedoed waiters on my staff, I wrote this book.

I can picture the rose hip bush whenever I see the ingredient listed somewhere, even on a jar of vitamin C (it’s a great natural source).  And I can tell you how and where mussels grow, and why the wines of Burgundy or the olive oils of Italy are different from those of Spain.  A few years ago, I had absolutely no clue where most of the commonly used natural and artificial ingredients come from, how they are processed, how we came to think of using them in food, or what they do. 

Now, I do.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I chose the Twinkie as the vehicle for this wild trip through ingredient land—a voyage of discovery of modern food technology.  The Twinkie ingredient list, published on every package, provides the narrative structure.  The chapters essentially mirror the label, the ingredients in descending order of prominence, with the exception of the multiple corn and soy ingredients, which are covered in the same chapters because of their common sources and processing.  Full of astonishing surprises, like how carbon monoxide plays a key role in making food additives, this journey—my journey--is the story of making convenience food, guided by science and commerce, just like the history of Twinkies themselves.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The intriguing, inspiring tidbits that made me want to dig even deeper, like a dictionary definition of phosphates (part of baking powder) that says, “Obtained from phosphate rock...Phosphorus was formerly used to treat rickets and degenerative disorders and is now used as a mineral supplement for foods; also in incendiary bombs and tracer bullets.”  Sure makes you wonder about what’s in those cakes.  Since when—and why--do we grind up rocks for food?  Or, for that matter, since when do we find it necessary to reduce naturally occurring resources like corn, soybeans, and petroleum into a brown goo that is so strong in its pure form it will blow out your taste buds, yet apparently fine to consume in cake-form?  How are noxious-sounding substances transformed into innocuous processed food ingredients? How is calcium sulfate (the food additive) different from calcium sulfate (the soil amendment), or from its most common form, plaster?

If you are what you eat, then it behooves you to know exactly what you are eating.  Especially if you eat a lot of polysorbate 60, cellulose gum, and Red. No. 40. 

Finding out where, at the lowest level, these sub-ingredients come from, tracing every finished product back down the processing chain (doing what scientists call a “root tracer”) is a way to give a sense of place to each ingredient.  And there are some surprising stories about how each ingredient came to be made and used.  Every chemical in the Twinkie comes from somewhere, and is made from things that come from somewhere else—usually from the ground.  (That leads to “Aren’t they all natural if they come from the earth?”--a question that dogs me still.)  Organic Twinkies, not.  What they are, how they are made, and how or why they are used and interact with the other ingredients are the bigger, guiding issues. 

It became evident that the Twinkie is a dynamic, complex food system, where the proteins (flour, caseinates, whey, and egg) build structure and the fat and sugar (oils, emulsifiers, and sweeteners of many kinds) fight with that structure, in order to provide moisture and tenderness.  Everything else on the list serves to balance these two tendencies out, some siding with moisture preservation (think “Shelf life!  Shelf life!”) and some helping the batter to stand up to the rigors of the commercial baking process (and to reduce overall cost). And then there’s the difference between the foods at the top of the list and the chemicals at the bottom—what’s that all about?  Why don’t I need those ingredients (calcium sulfate, sorbic acid, coloring, etc.) in my homemade cakes?  Sometimes it became difficult to relate the massive industrial and technical activities involved to making the ingredients for a simple baked good.  There is, in fact, quite a disconnect. 

As I watched mountains being moved to get at a mineral or visited mile-long factories to see things being refined, brewed, reacted, crushed, or dried, when I began to consider the awesome number of truck, ship, and trainloads involved, when I became aware of all the cooking and slicing and dicing of molecules, I began to question how we managed to engage serious science in the pursuit of creating something that isn’t even necessary to our existence.  I tried to find out how we came to make food additives on a global scale, and I had to wonder why we make such an enormous industrial effort to create artificial replacements for relatively unprocessed things like sugar or yeast.  I wondered where this industry fit in with the major industries of the world. 

And more importantly, I wanted to know:  when can I go see where they come from? 

=======

NOTE:  The above was excerpted from the the first chapter. 

Please contact the publisher if you wish to publish this.