Is There Suet in Twinkies?
Hostess Twinkies are the creation of James A. Dewar, who scarfed three a day and lived to be eighty-eight. “Twinkies was about the best darn-tootin’ idea I ever had,” he said. It makes you wonder about his bad ideas. Dewar noticed that bakers sold a lot of shortcake during strawberry season but couldn’t give it away the rest of the year. He figured that stuffing some sort of quasi-cream filling in the shortcake would make it palatable even without fruit. The first Twinkies were “creamed up” in Chicago in 1930 and were successful from day one.

“Dewar says its formula is a little bit of a secret,” reported the 1976 edition of the Snack Food Year Book. “He always refers to it as a creamed filling, emphasizing the need to ad the ‘ed’.” Get the hint? It isn’t fine Devonshire cream in there.

Contrary to popular belief, Twinkies do not have the shelf life of gravel. The modern Twinkie is baked in 190-foot-long ovens operating around the clock. The Continental Baking Company forecasts sales and delivers only a few days’ supply. (Demand is remarkably stable. If you’ve got a Twinkies monkey on your back, he’s on a short leash.) Twinkies are discarded if they don’t sell in four days.

Food labeling laws allow a certain amount of equivocation. The Twinkies label reads: “partially hydrogenated vegetable and/or animal shortening (contains one or more of the following: soybean oil, cottonseed oil, palm oil, beef fat, lard). Beef fat? Well, they don’t really concede that beef fat is in there. They just bury it in a list of possible ingredients.

I contacted Continental Baking and asked if beef fat and lard are used. D.F. Owen, Ph.D., Continental’s director of Nutrition & Consumer Affairs, said only that the label’s parenthetical list “describes those shortenings that we might use at any particular time. Their selection is based on availability and price.” I think that means he’s admitting that they use beef fat in Twinkies, but only if they can’t find anything cheaper.

The Food Products Formulary, the bible of the junk food business, gives a formula for Twinkies-like cream filling. Basically, it is almost half-sugar and another 30% or so is shortening. Much or all of the sugar is in the form of corn or sucrose syrup. You might count air as an ingredient, too, since they whip it up. The label’s unspecified “natural and artificial flavors” surely include vanilla and probably a synthetic butter flavor as well.

INGREDIENTS:
Air: Whipped into the white stuff to make it frothy
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Sugar and Corn Syrup: The filling is about 42% sugar by dry weight. Needed for quick energy, diminished-capacity legal defenses, etc.

Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil: On a scale of nutrition, this rates somewhere between Teflon and an air embolism. Twinkies’ chemists bubble hydrogen through vegetable oil, turning it into a soap-like solid.

Lard: The label hints at “vegetable and/or animal” shortening. Twinkies are not Kosher.

Beef Fat: Major gross-out ingredient. The fats used vary with commodity prices. Total shortening content: about 28%.

Skim Milk: A modest source of protein. About 7%, measured as weight of milk solids per total ingredient weight. No one at Continental Baking tries to promote Twinkies as a health food (they save the talk for Wonder Bread), but one executive claimed that a Los Angeles man lived seven years on a diet of Twinkies and Cutty Sark. This isn’t recommended.

Salt: About 0.25%

Vanilla: Gooey nuance in the Twinkies bouquet. Continental Baking experimented with banana- and strawberry-flavored fillings, but they never approached the popularity of plain vanilla.

Butter Flavoring: Needed to make beef suet taste like whipped cream straight from the can. Probably synthetic.

Lecithin: In everything and probably a Commie plot. They say it’s an emulsifier.

From: Bigger Secrets by William Poundstone