500,000,000 Twinkies are manufactured each year. They produce a glimmer in our eye thanks to cotton cellulose, the same substance that gives rocket fuel its shimmery sheen. While it’s true that President Bill Clinton put a Twinkie in a time capsule, it is not true that Twinkies can survive nuclear war. There is such a mind-altering quantity of sugar and sugar variants contained in these seductive cakes that the Twinkie Defense was once offered up during a double-murder trial. That’s just a sample of the insights to be found in a book devoted to the snack cake whose parent company filed for bankruptcy in January 2012.

Twenty five of 26 chapters in Steve Ettlinger’s Twinkie Deconstructed are dedicated to separate ingredients involved in the Twinkie’s creation, including substances that are challenging not just to the tongue but to the mind and to our health. On the one hand the life of a food engineer is sweet, what with all of the corn syrup, dextrose, glucose and high fructose corn syrup that goes into just one snack cake. On the other hand, variants of the Twinkie’s food-safe ingredient sodium acid pyrophosphate are also active in Monsanto’s popular RoundUp weed killer.

The book is an eye-opener, but it stops short of judging whether a cake made from ingredients traced back to oil fields, deep mines and steel mills should really be in our mouths and digestive systems. Instead, Ettlinger is using the Twinkie as a point of evidence in the argument for our food system to come to its senses.

And if the food industry won’t, then we need to come to ours.