From a Chinese oil refinery to your Twinkie

[arikara]

WHEN I began researching the ingredients for Twinkies, I naively thought that their raw materials were extracted from nuts, beans, fruit, seeds or leaves, and that they came from the United States. I was looking to link places with foods — along the lines of California wine or Maine lobster, but for thiamine mononitrate. It turned out that I was way off.

Although eight of the ingredients in the beloved little snack cake come from domestic corn and three from soybeans, there are others — including thiamine mononitrate — that come from petroleum. Chinese petroleum. Chinese refineries and Chinese factories. And there are other unexpected ingredients that are much harder to trace. So much for the great "All-American" snack food.

When you bite into a Twinkie, you are chewing on an international nexus of suppliers. Most of our processed foods — salad dressing, ice cream, meal-replacement drinks — are processed with foreign additives: essential ones, like B vitamins for fortifying flour and the preservative sorbic acid, as well as Malaysian or Indonesian palm oil products, European wheat gluten, Peruvian colorants, Chadian gums and Swiss niacin, made from Swiss water, Swiss air (nitrogen) and North Atlantic or Middle Eastern oil. It's a nice contrast to recall that Champagne comes only from Champagne, France.

..more...
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-0e-ettlinger29may29,0,7374864.story?track=rss

:-)
My apologies if this has been posted before. I'm not able to use the search.

[Buzz Clik]

1. Although I wouldn't eat a Twinkie on a bet ...

... your point is well taken.

The good news is petroleum is organic, right?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

2. Thiamine is also known as vitamin B1.

Didn't known it was synthetic, but we've been fortifying foods for years.

[kestrel91316]

3. There's a reason why Twinkies are called "junk food". Let the buyer beware.