Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger Read Free Book Online Page B

have their own signature way of roasting chicken or making french fries, and all the giant vitamin companies have their own, usually patented, ways of making riboflavin, also known as vitamin B2. A few make it from chemical synthesis, but most ferment it from a microorganism: yeast, a fungus, or bacteria. Candida yeasts are common; Ashbya gossypii fungus is used to make about 30 percent of the world’s supply of B2; and some of the biggest producers favor a bacteria called Bacillus subtilis . Some make it from spent beer grain, recycled by the beer companies. In nature, B2 comes from leafy green veggies, liver, fish, milk, and poultry. In manufacturing, it might be fair to say that the vitamin is extracted from natural sources (these microorganisms are all natural to soil), but it is not quite that simple.
    Generally the Chinese vitamin companies ferment riboflavin by putting what they call the “master organism” in a stew of various fats or carbohydrates along with some vitamins and minerals and a combination of temperatures and air in ways that vary from place to place as much as cooking technique might vary from chef to chef. With fats, it might be a stinky mix of nutrient-rich waste fats, or cod liver oil or canola or soybean oil. As when making beer, some use a carbohydrate mash made of sugar from beet or cane molasses or liquid rice; glucose from corn is popular, too. Others use specially treated millet seeds, kept for a week at the optimum breeding temperature of 90°F. The enzymes that live secrete what becomes riboflavin.
    Whatever alchemy of temperature and nutrients produces the most massive reproduction of these little critters becomes the recipe at that particular factory. And it might take five or ten years to find and develop the best strain of bacteria, using genetic modification. But when done correctly, this signature combination could mean patents and big profits. And so it is seemingly worth it, and all, of course, a big secret.
    The largest vitamin B2 manufacturer in the world is Guangji Pharmaceutical Co., located in a modern, well-landscaped plant in Hubei, China, on the Yangtze River. While the plant also makes other raw materials for pharmaceuticals and animal feed, it makes over two thousand tons a year of riboflavin, worth more than a billion dollars. Guangji ferments its brew in tanks that can hold ten thousand gallons, and stand as much as six stories high. Expertise in fermentation is common in Asia, thanks to centuries of fermenting rice for wine and soybeans for tofu. The enzymes work for a few days, finally excreting riboflavin.
    The vitamin is extracted from the fermentation broth through a complex process that involves multiple steps (concentration, purification, crystallization, drying, and milling) in order to obtain a deep orange flour-like powder that smells slightly stinky (like rotten wood) and is then packed into little twenty-kilogram drums for shipment around the world. The color is due simply to its molecular structure. (Riboflavin is also used as a natural yellow food colorant, often for Easter eggs. If you take extra vitamin B2 supplements your urine turns bright yellow; Guangji had to build a treatment plant just to get rid of the orange in its waste-water).
    Without riboflavin, we’d have trouble growing. We’d suffer cracks around the mouth, sores around the nose and ears, a sore tongue, and light-sensitive eyes, and, most important, we would fail to convert food into energy—more than enough reason to include it in the fortification mix.
    F OLIC A CID (B9): T HE N EW O NE
    Only a Brit could have discovered folate. In the 1930s, Dr. Lucy Wills found she could cure a certain kind of anemia with Marmite, the dark, yeast-based goo that Brits and Aussies insist on spreading on their morning toast, despite it tasting like a salty, bitter, awful form of molasses. A decade later, the compound was isolated from spinach and named after the Latin word for foliage, folium (it is