Photos of the 37 Ingredients That Go Into Making a Twinkie

By now, you’ve probably heard the sad news: Twinkie maker Hostess announced last week that it plans to shut down and sell off all its assets. To pay tribute to the popular — and not-so-good-for-you — snack cake, here’s an interesting project photographer Dwight Eschliman shot a while back, titled, “37 or So Ingredients.”

Eschliman based the project on the 37 individual ingredients listed by author Steve Ettlinger in his book, “Twinkie, Deconstructed.” The photographer collected a sample of each one, and then photographed it on a glass dish to show Twinkie fans what they’re eating every time they pop one of the cream-filled snacks in their mouth.

Eschliman writes,

I’ve never been a health nut. But I was raised by one. My mother wouldn’t let us kids within one hundred feet of meat, eggs, white bread, or any sort of processed food. She made homemade wheat gluten. How many moms do that? I don’t even remember seeing a Twinkie or Hostess Cupcake until I left for college. Once I left the safety of my mother’s kitchen, I loosened up a bit. Not so much that I traded in all of my vegetables for processed food, but enough to think that Cap’n Crunch, Fritos and Jiffy Peanut Butter most decidedly deserved a place in my new diet.

More recently, when I became a parent, I started thinking a bit about food. I began to consider which foodstuffs are healthy and which are not. Given how much thought my own mother put into it, it was hard not to. A career in photography has provided me license to embrace my obsessive compulsive side. I love the idea of taking any object and deconstructing it down to its component parts. Essentially, I find great thrill in lining things up and photographing them. Thus, this project. The Twinkie is made up of 37 or so ingredients and this is what they look like.

Here are some of the 37 ingredients:

Animal Shortening
Modified Cornstarch
Riboflavin
Polysorbate 60
Soy Lecithin
Niacin
Iron
FD&C Yellow #5
Monoglyceride
Red 40
Cellulose Gum
Diglyceride

Combine these 12 ingredients with 25 others, and this is what results:

Yum! Makes you hungry, doesn’t it? You can find the rest of the 37 ingredients over on Eschliman’s website.


Image credits: Photographs by Dwight Eschliman and used with permission

Discussion