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millers found that they could duplicate the three-month, natural maturation process in only a matter of seconds by pumping minute amounts of chlorine gas (less than 25 ppm) into the flour, simultaneously achieving three results: bleaching; oxidation (taming the protein or starch to the point where it is practically nonfunctional, so as to yield bread and cakes with a soft, delicate crumb); and balancing (reducing the pH by generating just a bit of hydrochloric acid to further tame the protein). Once this became evident, in 1912, chlorination started in earnest.
    It is not clear exactly how this all works; what is clear is that this treatment makes bleached flour the only kind that works in sugar-heavy and “high-ratio” (more sugar than flour) cakes like Twinkies or birthday and wedding cakes. Not only do you not need chlorinated flour to make bread, you don’t want it—chlorination knocks out gluten’s strength. Cakes made with unbleached flour and approximately equal amounts of sugar, like pound cakes, tend to be heavier, coarser, or denser than tender sponge cakes. In other words, no chlorine, no Twinkie.
    P IG IN A P OKE
    Because it is so dangerous, chlorine for bleaching flour is usually shipped in accident- and bullet-proof, seven-foot-long pressurized tanks called pigs. They are so heavily constructed—some of the steel is 1.5 inches thick—that an empty one-ton (2,000-pound) capacity tank actually weighs 1,500 pounds.
    When the chlorine-filled pigs are finally delivered to Alexander’s flour mill, they are penned in a tiny, specially constructed, high-security, negative air pressure, hazardous material bungalow. A timid glance inside reveals that they look especially small and unassuming for something so potentially dangerous. And the chlorine just barely trickles out of the pigs into the mill, where it is fed into an agitator, the last step in the milling process. This agitator is not a political troublemaker, but rather a seven-foot-long, submarine-like mixing container. The flour is pushed through it by five-inch-long, maple paddles that fluff up the flour to keep it airborne so that it can mix easily and continually with the chlorine gas being sprayed in. In this otherwise stainless steel world, wooden paddles are one of the few things that stand up to the highly corrosive chlorine. The reaction is instant, and the flour emerges properly bleached and acid-balanced after only a few seconds. The now white flour shoots out a large tube over our heads and out across the road to the blending building to become enriched with vitamins, the final treatment before it can be used in cakes.
    The short story is that the mill has to put back into the flour what it took out of it, plus a little extra for good measure (and good health). The long story is that it has to go all around the world to get what it needs.

CHAPTER 4
    Enrichment Blend: Ferrous Sulfate and B Vitamins—Niacin, Thiamine Mononitrate (B1), Riboflavin (B2), Folic Acid
    I n 1915, ten thousand people in the United States died of pellagra. If you haven’t heard of pellagra or anyone dying of it lately, that is thanks largely to enriched flour. If everyone ate a well-balanced diet, or used only whole wheat flour, and/or took vitamin supplements whenever they were needed, enrichment—the process of adding back vitamins and minerals to foods from which they were removed—would become unnecessary and obsolete. (Fortification—adding vitamins and minerals to foods that don’t normally have them—is a different animal.)
    In 1938, the U.S. government realized it could fight pellagra, beriberi, iron deficiency anemia, and other diseases by fortifying commonly consumed foods with nutrients in the form of vitamins and a mineral (iron). Because flour was not only the most commonly eaten food in America at that time, but also one that was easily modified, and because industrial manufacturing of some vitamins had recently become a commercial reality, on January