Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger

Author:Steve Ettlinger [Ettlinger, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2007-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Baking Soda

Hurtling 1,600 feet downward at a windy 450 feet per minute in an open-mesh steel cage the size of a double garage, I’m risking my life—or, at least, my sanity—to see where the raw ingredient shared by two of the leavening ingredients on the Twinkies label comes from. Leavening makes things go up, but to see it I’m going down—way down.

I’m wearing earplugs, amplifying the machinery’s rumbling and clanging sounds inside my head, along with a blinding miner’s lamp on my hard hat that makes for constantly moving shadows. My knees are a little weak with fright and the big, tough-looking miners standing around me are not reassuring, even if I could hear them through my earplugs and over the roar of the wind and the machinery. I am having trouble connecting this experience with the ubiquitous little yellow box of baking soda that sits in so many kitchen cabinets and refrigerators around the world.

I’m also wearing safety glasses, brand-new cotton gloves, and a wide tool belt with a very heavy battery for my headlamp (“Good for sixteen hours!” my host reassures me), as well as a canteen-size emergency self-rescue carbon monoxide breathing kit in case of fire. I’ve also been given a dust mask (“just in case”) and a course in mine safety for which I am presented with an official U.S. Department of Labor Certificate of Training. All this just to see where an unassuming kitchen staple comes from?

Tim Davis, a Senior Mining Engineer with FMC Corporation and my guide, tells me to avoid looking him or others in the face because the bright miner’s lamp on my helmet will blind them. The word is, never look a miner in the eye. So we all affect a slightly bashful stance as we descend, painting the floor with pools of light as we head down into raw baking soda.

FINDING WYOMING

Green River, Wyoming, a region of brown earth and white alkali flats, sits atop the world’s largest and purest trona deposit, which is not very impressive to most people because they have never heard of it. Trona was discovered in 1938, almost by accident when Mountain Fuel Supply, a company then based in Ohio (and now part of the much larger Questar natural gas company), drilled a wildcat exploratory oil well in this mineral-rich area along the Oregon Trail. Instead of oil, they found soft, brown, layered stone. A sample was sent to the U.S. Geological Survey office in Washington, D.C., where it sat, ignored, for more than a year.

When the agency finally got around to analyzing it, the geologists found that it was a sedimentary rock made largely of pure sodium sesquicarbonate, which is easily cooked into sodium carbonate, commonly known as soda ash. Soda ash is the basic chemical ingredient in glass and soap, its most common and ancient uses (about half of the soda ash produced goes into glass); it is also widely used in hundreds of essential chemical products including detergents and water softeners.

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