Twinkie, Deconstructed (15 page)

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Around the corner from the chilly unloading area, the machines take over. They are not without human company, but people are clearly the minority.

First, the eggs are conveyed in stacks, from which steel arms pluck individual trays and align them for washing and sanitizing. The machine that accomplishes this at this facility is quite similar to the kind of dishwasher you would find in any large restaurant kitchen, only it’s over sixty-five feet long. Then, the eggs are picked up thirty at a time by mechanical arms (dotted with suction cups) and placed precisely in rows of dozens on a wide, slow conveyor that is part of another continuous, giant washing machine. A bright light underneath allows for inspection through the shells by sharp-eyed monitors.

These busy human teammates are mostly women who carefully pluck out bad eggs (cracked or fertilized) and deftly replace them with good ones so that the conveyor stays full as it moves along. The bad eggs, called inedibles (as in “not suitable for human consumption”), get dropped quickly into a familiar-looking, low-tech device called a “bucket” designated for the sideline production of pet food. A small silo out back is reserved solely for these outcasts.

One by one, the rows of eggs fall off the end of the conveyor like Rockettes taking a bow. Each egg falls into a cup on a giant spinning wheel that’s part of the aptly named “egg breaking-and-separating machine,” which is whirring at blur speed despite its ten-foot diameter and eight-foot height. There are two rows of cups on some half a dozen machines of various sizes and customized designs. On one machine, the egg is immediately seized on each oval end by two small suction cups. The supporting cup falls away, and the fun begins.

Picture one egg among many suspended on a whizzing carousel, and follow the process as you walk around the wheel: a knife shoots up to give the egg a surgical whack, slicing cleanly through the shell. It then falls back into position, ready for the next hit a second later. Suction cups pull the shell halves back and up at a slight angle, perfectly mimicking the gesture countless cooks make in their kitchens as they crack eggs one by one. The yolk and white drop down into a set of corresponding cups. As the yolk plops down into a small, appropriately sized upper cup, the white falls down around it into a funnel cup, just underneath. Gentle blasts of air coax the last of the egg out of its shell, and the yolk cups are bounced a bit to shake the white completely out—again, much like you do at home.

As the giant wheel spins, both yolk and white pass through electronic scanners that zero in on shell bits, white in the yolk, or yolk in the white. Some very focused attendants supervise them. As the wheel whirls toward the end of its revolution, the cups tip into two open stainless steel troughs (if separate egg parts are desired), or one (if the goal is whole eggs). The shells are spun off into oblivion, destined to be dried and ground into fertilizer for local farmers, and the suction cups position themselves for the next round of eggs a split second later. The whole process takes less than ten seconds.

Different breaker-separator machines work at different speeds, and some are reputed to break well over 140,000 eggs per hour. When I’m showing my daughter how to break eggs with essentially the same motions, it takes us about a minute just to break one.

Pumping and pasteurizing eggs through the jungle of narrow, highly polished stainless steel pipes take no less a delicate touch than it takes to handle shell eggs, as failure to maintain the right combination of time, temperature, and movement in those pipes could spell disaster in the form of a three-inch-diameter omelet dozens of yards long. After a flash pasteurization process and a quick homogenization, the egg mixture is pumped through an array of chilled, sterile silos ranging in size from 5,000 to 20,000 gallons. From there, liquid eggs are pumped into sterilized tank trucks, which are insulated but not cooled (this would only pose a problem if the truck got stalled for a few days in a huge traffic jam on a hot day in August with close to 50,000 pounds of raw eggs inside). Some customers take them in 2,000-pound plastic boxes sized to fit on pallets; others prefer “just-in-time” delivery, which involves pumping the eggs directly from the tanker into a mixing vat. Now that’s fresh. Sort of. The nesters are history less than an hour after leaving the truck.

Not all of the freshly broken eggs are shipped out in raw form (the preferred form among the higher-end products): some of the mixture is frozen (often a second choice in flavor quality), and, at other facilities, much of it is dried. The broken eggs sent to the freezing plant are mixed with corn syrup or salt (eggs will not freeze well without one of these) and then frozen in thirty-pound, five-gallon buckets for big bakers such as Twinkies and Sara Lee. In the Elizabeth plant, some of the liquid egg mixture is channeled directly into a nearby kitchen, where it is cooked into uniform oval, half-inch-thick omelets and frozen for use by school cafeterias and major fast-food chains. If you want a few million omelets, you’ve got to break a few million eggs.

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The Elizabeth facility thrives on variety, but Michael Foods’ Wakefield, Nebraska, plant is the principal source for dried eggs. This is one of the biggest laying facilities in the world, with about 4 million hens laying eggs daily, all under the watchful eye of Tim Bebee, Vice President of Live Production. What with the plant located in the Midwest, shipment to either coast is long and obviously not advised for unbroken “shell” eggs. So the eggs are broken on-site at the chicken houses, using the same process as in the Elizabeth, New Jersey, plant, and dried just a short tank truck ride away. There, tiny droplets of pasteurized egg are sprayed into the tops of multiple hot-air box dryers twenty feet tall, thirty feet deep, and fifty feet long. Before your very eyes, dried eggs fall to the bottom as a powder, and are promptly packed into fifty-pound boxes or bags for shipping to bakeries or cafeterias.

A big bakery such as one that makes Twinkies might require dried or frozen eggs as well as liquid eggs, separated or in various yolk/white blends depending on recipe changes, pricing, or the equipment on hand. Each form of egg product requires its own recipe or handling adjustment: fresh eggs need refrigeration; frozen eggs need freezers and time to thaw; and the chef must know to compensate for the added salt or sugar.

Dried eggs, with their lack of moisture and subsequent resistance to spoilage, are actually more practical for use in a product with a long shelf life, like the Twinkie. Being relatively shelf stable, dried eggs are by far the easiest, cheapest, and safest form to handle (no refrigeration or freezing needed, thus almost no worry of contamination). That’s why it is likely that the vast majority of eggs used in cakes these days are dried, primarily due to safety issues, but also due to the obvious cost-effectiveness. They are easier to use than other forms, too. The powder is simply mixed into the dough at the outset—there’s no need for separate rehydration; merely add a little extra water to the batter and a little extra time to soak it up.

Though scrambled eggs made from powder never taste quite like fresh eggs, dried eggs work quite well in a baked item in which they are a minor ingredient and all of the other ingredients work together to disguise any “off” flavors. All of the other functions that eggs perform remain apparently intact.

Industry professionals may promote their product as the “incredible, edible egg,” but what’s incredible, in fact, is egg harvesting, from the seven-degree slant of a nester’s cage to the whirling carousel that mimics a chef ’s gesture. And, of course, there are those trucks full of eggs, six thousand gallons of raw eggs careening down the highway. Given that nearly everyone’s made a cake with eggs, it’s not hard to imagine eggs in Twinkies. It’s a lot harder to picture cotton—or trees—as cake ingredients. But that they are.

CHAPTER 12

Cellulose Gum

C
ellulose is literally everywhere. It is, in fact, one of the most abundant, renewable, natural resources in the world, or, more accurately, in our biosphere. All green plants synthesize it to make their cell walls, making their stems and leaf veins rigid and fork-resistant—good sources of fiber in your diet. And though cellulose is stiff when chemically cooked, highly purified, and transformed into cellulose gum, it makes an incredibly soft goop that is perfect for lending viscosity to the filling in snack cakes—or rocket fuel.

Cellulose gum is one of the few ingredients on the Twinkies label with no real “home equivalent.” In fact, the closest you’d come to mimicking the job of cellulose gum at home is wrapping your pudding, sauce, or cake tightly and putting it in the fridge, or tossing some gelatin into your whipped cream to keep it from slumping. Hard to believe it comes from cotton and trees.

Even though cellulose gum is more of a modern food additive, our interest in plain, basic cellulose as a chemical began more than a century ago.

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Germany in the late 1800s was a hotbed of scientific creativity, and the search for a suitable material for photographic film by the old Kodak competitor, Agfa (the company that invented color film), may have led to the discovery of just how to extract cellulose acetate from a wood pulp soup. German chemical giant IG Farben then took it a bit further. Looking to make artificial silk, Farben synthesized cellulose gum in its labs to end up with rayon, first produced on a major scale in Germany in 1934 (a patent was issued in 1918). Meanwhile, in the United States, Dow Chemical had begun making cellophane from cellulose in 1927, which was followed by ethyl cellulose, its first plastic resin, in 1935 (better known for its use in items like luggage, hard hats, hairbrushes, and flashlight cases, ethyl cellulose is fortunately not found in Twinkies). However indirectly, the invention of rayon and ethyl cellulose led to the use of cellulose in food, until World War II put a stop to the German export of cellulose to the United States.

In the 1960s, with the drive for less expensive and lower-fat processed foods, cellulose gum found its way into foods like ice cream, as well as pharmaceutical and personal care products like toothpaste. Today, cellulose gum’s popularity continues to grow multifold. And there is no problem finding a good supply of the raw material. You don’t have to pump it out of the ground in the Middle East.

You can just grow it.

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Both trees and cotton are farmed sources of cellulose gum, but each has its own strengths and limitations. Tree farming, for example, may be the slowest farming in the world. It takes about twenty or twenty-five years for a crop of “fast-growing” pine or spruce trees to reach market size—about nine inches in diameter at breast height. After a year or so, seedlings don’t require much in the way of weeding or herbicides. Fertilizing is suggested only once or twice a generation, something most lawn owners would love.

Private landowners grow most of the pine in the Southeast (in fact, most U.S. forestland is privately owned), and most of those tree farms—typically less than five hundred acres—can be found in southeast Georgia and northeast Florida; you can see rows and rows of farmed pines from Route 95 just below the Georgia-Florida border. A lot of families, especially those who can trace their plantation ownership back generations, have switched from cotton or peanuts to trees, thanks in part to federal subsidies and the extraordinarily attractive advantage of having to harvest the crop only every (human) generation or so, rather than every year. Good timber management encourages traditional wildlife (and hunting) in the area, and there is a constant market for pulpwood. It’s a nice life, albeit a little on the quiet side. One fifth-generation landowner and tree farmer, Don Bell, of Albany, Georgia, says, “I just enjoy seeing the trees grow.”

In big wood-growing regions (the U.S. Southeast has been called “the wood basket of the world”), softwood trees from the region are stripped of their bark and branches and turned into what appear to be telephone poles—for about an instant. A noisy fury of a machine reduces them in no time to quarter-inch-thick chips about one or two inches square. At the so-called dissolving pulp mills (only about three are left in the United States), such as Rayonier in Jessup, Georgia, and Fernandina Beach, Florida, or Tembec in Temiscaming, Quebec, the chips undergo a chemical pulping process in house-size vats called digesters ( just as wood is pulped for paper, pressure cooked in a treatment with acids and bleaches), which dissolve the lignin (the glue that holds the fibers together) so that it and the other chemical component of wood, hemicellulose, can be extracted. The difference between pulping for food and pulping for paper is the purity—food-grade pulp must be made to exacting specifications and, one hopes, without traces of harmful chemicals.

Unlike trees, most domestic cotton is grown on large family farms that average around three thousand acres. Also, cotton goes through a few more (and more expensive) levels of processing before it is turned into pulp. No longer a labor-intensive business, thanks to modern equipment, cotton farming is now capital-intensive: a John Deere mechanical picker can cost well over $300,000. These machines look a bit like combines, equipped with special fingers several feet long that protrude from the front of the machine in order to gather the crop from the plants as they move over the field.

Farmers like Allen Helms, of Marion, Arkansas, need only four or five helpers at harvesttime to run the machines. Helms has grown cotton on this land near the Mississippi River, opposite Memphis, for thirty-six years. His season is a bit shorter and more labor-intensive than the tree “season”—he plants every year in late April or early May and harvests from late September through October, as is typical across the deep South. The plant’s twiggy stems, which can grow as long as eighteen inches, are not harvested, but simply ground up and dug back into the soil. Helms’s trusty mechanical picker spits out giant loaves of cotton, bales (with the decidedly unfolksy name of “modules”) the size of trucks, thirty-two feet long, eight feet high, and eight feet wide, which are hauled off, one at a time, to the local cotton gin.