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Enough About Twinkies, Do You Know What's In Them?

Yes, we all love Twinkies, but do you know what's actually in them? What is polysorbate 60, for instance? In 2009, StudioTulsa host Rich Fisher spoke with Steve Ettlinger, who made an exhaustive investigation into how the popular sponge cake was made, and how the ingredients themselves are created.  He found that Twinkies were as much a chemically created product as a baked one.

The book is "Twinkie Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats;" in it, Ettlinger explores how both food preservatives and processed foods are manufactured. So while Twinkies could be endangered by the liquidation of Hostess Foods, the book offers far more information than most of us might want to know about the other processed foods that are in our everyday diet.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.