It has a name that many people can't utter without a smirk, yet half a billion of them are sold each year. The stuff of urban legend, pop-culture satire and even then-U.S. president Bill Clinton's Millennium Time Capsule, Twinkie is about as iconic as an American food can get.

Since its birth during the Depression, the gold-coloured cakelet has morphed from scrumptious symbol of American ingenuity to epitome of additive-laden junk. Rumour has it that the gold-coloured snack can last forever (in truth, the shelf life is about 25 days).

The belief that a Twinkie can survive a nuclear holocaust inspired an episode of the animated series The Family Guy, while an instalment last year of the comic strip Doonesbury joked that a year's supply of Twinkies are baked every February.

When New York City writer Steve Ettlinger set out several years ago to write a book about artificial ingredients in processed foods, Twinkie emerged as the perfect specimen.

"It's the quintessential processed food," says Ettlinger, author of Twinkie, Deconstructed (Hudson Street/Penguin). "And the ingredients in a Twinkie are found, I realized pretty early on, in most processed foods; they're in canned goods, they're in salad dressings, they're in ice cream, cookies."

Ettlinger, a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, got the idea for his book while at the beach in Connecticut with his son and daughter.

The kids were eating ice cream bars, and dad, as was his wont, began reading the list of ingredients. Soon the children wanted to know what polysorbate 60 was and where it came from. Dad was stumped.

That substance – an "emulsifier" that basically does the work of cream and eggs at much lower cost, and is created through a complicated chemical process involving corn syrup, palm oil and petroleum – has its own section in Twinkie, Deconstructed. In fact, each of the 26 chapters in Ettlinger's book is devoted to a Twinkie component.

The cake's main ingredient is wheat flour, while its least prevalent are the dyes "yellow no. 5" and "red no. 40." In between are substances including water, corn sweeteners and syrup, cellulose gum and sodium stearoyl lactylate.

In the course of five years of research, Ettlinger sometimes had to remind himself that he was writing about something you eat and not, say, the mineral, petrochemical or wood pulp industries.

"Some of the ingredients listed on the Twinkie ingredient label are recognizable foods, sugar and flour, and so forth," he says. "And the corn and soybean products, while highly processed, nonetheless obviously start with corn and soybeans.

"But the more chemical-sounding names, or the names of things that are unfamiliar, I thought at one point would be sourced from raw materials like seeds or berries or weeds or bark or something. Somewhere I figured there'd be a factory with a recognizable food coming in the back door and the more odd-sounding thing coming out the front."

Instead, he found himself interviewing scientists about complicated, sometimes dangerous, chemical reactions – or visiting mines.

"Almost any bread or cake you eat is made from at least five different kinds of rock," says Ettlinger. "The raw material for baking powder and a few other things are rocks."

So the author went 500 metres beneath the ground in Green River, Wyo., to observe the mining of trona, a rock containing sodium sesquicarbonate, from which baking soda is derived.

Ettlinger discovered that a whole lot of Twinkie ingredients – as with many other processed foods – are derived from petroleum and petroleum products.

That includes the food colouring that gives Twinkies their warm, golden-yellow glow. "The colours are made in great part from petroleum products in China," says Ettlinger. "Their final mix is usually in the country that's using the colour. In this case, I travelled to St. Louis, where I saw the grey powders mixed together and then turning bright red or yellow."

Some of the B vitamins that enrich most flour are also derived at least partly from petroleum, such as niacin or B3 (the ingredients are water, air and petroleum), and thiamine mononitrate or B1 (from coal tar).

"It's pure chemistry," says Ettlinger. "I really thought if anything was going to be extracted from a plant, somehow it would be vitamins, and they're not. And then the minerals – the lone mineral, ferrous sulphate, definitely is not. Ferrous sulphate, which you can buy as an iron supplement in your pharmacy, is made from running steel at a steel mill through a big bath of sulphuric acid."

It doesn't exactly get the salivary glands working overtime. Neither do Ettlinger's descriptions of the toxic substances that are raw materials for some processed-food ingredients.

Flammable and carcinogenic benzene, for example, plays a major role in the extremely complicated set of chemical reactions that yield the artificial flavouring vanillin.

And the chlorine used to bleach the flour in Twinkies – and the cakes many of us bake at home – is extremely toxic.

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"It's hard to wrap your mind around that," he concedes, "unless you remind yourself that you have two very reactive and toxic chemicals sitting on your kitchen table. Before you get alarmed, let me tell you that it's salt. So we have to remind ourselves that a lot of common foods at first blush seem like they might be made of dangerous chemicals, but the chemicals react together to make harmless and even benign chemicals that we eat."

His descriptions of alternate uses for the ingredients he explores can be eye-opening. Take cane sugar, which – together with corn-derived products – accounts for the 4 3/4 teaspoons of sweeteners in each Twinkie.

As Ettlinger points out in Twinkie, Deconstructed, cane sugar and its derivatives are added to polyurethane foam to work as a flame retardant, and are used to make water-based ink, cure tobacco, and help clean out cement mixers. Sweet.

Several Twinkie ingredients are manufactured in China and India. Despite the recall by Mississauga's Menu Foods and other companies of pet food containing gluten from China tainted with melamine, Ettlinger is confident that the global trade in food additives is safe. Still, he has mixed feelings.

"My suspicion is that the food for human consumption is produced under more rigorous conditions and controls than food for pets," he says. "I was very reassured by the high level of professionalism among the people I met, the places I went.

"But, yes, it makes you pause for a moment to consider that all these products, which are super-concentrated and used in small, small amounts, are also spread across, because of that, many millions of servings of products. Should there be a problem with a raw ingredient coming from, say, a foreign country, it would be spread around every part of the continent in no time."

Although he describes himself in Twinkie, Deconstructed as a foodie who delighted in the regional foods of France while living there for six years, and who likes to gather mussels when he visits coastal Maine every summer, Ettlinger, 58, strikes a non-judgmental tone in his book and his interview with the Star.

Does he eat Twinkies? Almost never, he says. "I snack more on whole foods, and I'm probably more conscious of that now. Nuts, fruits.

"I'll leave the preaching to others about how you should eat local or organic foods," he continues. "But if people ask me, `Is the Twinkie bad for you?' which is a way of saying, `Is it good for you?' – if you want something that is good for you, eat fruits and vegetables and don't worry about the rest."

Nor is Ettlinger keen to pounce on Twinkie – and, specifically, the high-fructose corn syrup it contains – as a guilty party in North America's obesity epidemic. "When I researched (high-fructose corn syrup), I was prepared to find all kinds of nasty things about it because the molecules are changed in such a way that they might be hard to digest," he says. "In fact, I could not find any damning scientific studies."

Ettlinger maintains the jury is still out, but he cites portion size as a more likely culprit. "When I was growing up, Coke and Pepsi (both of which contain high-fructose corn syrup) were served as treats in six-ounce cups or eight-ounce bottles. And now people are drinking Coke and Pepsi routinely as a beverage at meals, quite often buying 22-ounce bottles."

But, didn't Ettlinger experience any distaste or horror while deconstructing the Twinkie? "I experienced more amazement," he replies.

"It continues to stun me the extent to which we go to make artificial ingredients and the extent to which those ingredients are bound up in the major industries of the world.

"For example, 14 of the most common chemicals we use are found in Twinkies. I mention the Twinkie-Industrial Complex. It's tied in with major industries that are also often tied with government policy. This isn't mere food," he says. "This is industry."