What's in a Twinkie anyway and do you really want to know?

Newsweek asks why is it you can bake a cake at home with as few as six ingredients but a Hostess Twinkie requires a whopping thirty-nine?

The answer of course is to have an unnaturally long shelf-life of almost a month thus "normal" ingredients like milk, cream or butter all must be replaced with things like cellulose gum, lecithin and sodium stearoyl lactylate. Not the type of thing mom was using in the kitchen.

Now its true that not many adults eat any of the 500 million Twinkies made each year, but since many of us ate them as kids there is some curiosity about what we were packing into our stomachs. The story can now be told thanks to a new book called "Twinkie, Deconstructed" (and no thanks to Hostess who refused to help with the book).

Out of the thirty-nine ingredients in a Twinkie there are a few recognizable ones: flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, water and a trace of egg.

As for the rest, be prepared for incomprehensible and barely pronounceable ingredients that resemble industrial materials more than foodstuffs. Here is a sampling:

The cake:

* Lecithin is an emulsifier made from soy. It's also used in paint to keep pigments evenly dispersed.
* Diacetyl mimics the taste of butter, since the real stuff would go rancid on a store shelf.
* Cornstarch is a common thickener. But it's more often used to make cardboard and packing peanuts.
* Yellow No. 5 & Red No. 40 give the cake the golden look of eggs.
* Sorbic acid, the only actual preservative in Twinkies, comes from petroleum.

The filling

* Shortening (in the form of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and/or beef fat) is the main ingredient.
* Polysorbate 60 is a gooey substance that helps replace cream and eggs at a fraction of the cost. It's derived from corn, palm oil and petroleum.
* Cellulose gum gives the crème filling a smooth, slippery feel.
* Artificial vanillin is synthesized in petrochemical plants. The real thing comes from finicky tropical orchids that are pollinated by hand on the one day they bloom.

There are many more things to be found in those 160-calorie cellophane sealed packages, but to find those out we'll have to read the book.