Just when Alex Kapranos was sitting in the clubhouse, feeling secure in his hammerlock on the Most Disappointing Food Book of 06-07 title, a dark horse emerges and soars beyond this benchmark in an almost Beamonish way. I was looking forward to Twinkie, Deconstructed, in spite of its title. I am not much of a theory person, but my day job makes me leery of "deconstructed" as used in food writing. It almost always means "disassembled," and disassembled in a way that is complicit with the original system of constructing the dish. There are other folks more willing than I to take a crack at what deconstruction is, but even a naif like me knows there's more to it than reverse engineering. One does not deconstruct a carburetor, slap in new jets, and motor away.
That objection aside, I hoped that the conceit of tracing Twinkie ingredients back to their source might offer some insight into the perversity of this foodstuff, and more broadly, on how we eat. A snack-sized Omnivore's Dilemma, if you will. No such luck. Each chapter traces a specific ingredient back to its source. Given the rather engineered nature of the Twinkie, that usually means a factory. It would be possible for this format to be interesting, but almost every chapter narrates a tour arranged by the proprietors of the factory. Reading this book is like being trapped in sixth grade with a perverse teacher who takes you on a tedious field trip every day. The author makes no bones about his cooperation with his hosts in his acknowledgments, but the end result reads like a Jetsons-era hommage to the lads in the white coats who are making our lives better and better every day. One imagines that if the author read McPhee's Oranges, he would point out that Tang has more vitamin C. Twinkie, Deconstructed need not be Silent Spring, The Lunchbox Edition, but I can't think of another monograph with a subject as dubious that is as fawning. I suggest retitling it Twinkie: An Authorized Biography.
In the spirit of fairness, I should mention that I read The Secret of Scent just before reading the Twinkie book, and it did a good deal to illuminate its flaws. The cinetrix had The Secret of Scent out from the library, and I took a peek before it was to go back, and was surprised to be enthralled in a subject that was of limited interest to me. This book lives up to its title, and puts the reader in the middle of the ongoing effort to understand how we smell, and how we can synthesize smells. Even with a heavy smattering of diagrams of organic molecules, the science is accessible to a layperson, and the author's passion animates the science. I gather that the status of scicence in our culture is a major component of the new CJR roundup of food writing, which I have not read, but Grinder suggests that it suggests that Pollan is a bit of a Luddite. Possible, but these two books demonstrate how healthy a bit of skepticism is for the author of nonfiction, and how dangerous its absence can be.
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