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a vitamin in each of several pieces of fruit, for example, varies widely with the crop and storage specifics, how much you eat, and how well your meals are balanced.
    So eating a little enriched white flour isn’t necessarily a bad idea—and in the United States, it’s your only option.
    The B vitamins in enriched flour come from elemental ores, petroleum, bacteria, or fungi made in ways you would never allow in your house. Some are a total chemical synthesis, and some are fermented. There are four vitamins and one mineral in the enriched flour that’s used in Twinkies, and they don’t grow in the local wheat fields. Most of them come from lands far, far away: Switzerland and China. Iron, the lone mineral, is the only one that can still come from the States, and has a popular foreign alternative.
    F ERROUS S ULFATE : I RON S ALT AND P ICKLE L IQUOR
    The touch of iron in a Twinkie usually begins not only in iron ore mines in Minnesota, which is no surprise, but also in oil wells, which is.
    Sulfate, as the name suggests, is derived from sulfur, which is no longer mined but instead refined out of high-sulfur (“sour”) crude oil, a step developed primarily to lessen air pollution when the oil is burned. Almost all of the refineries around the country, such as those near the Gulf Coast, buy crude oil from sources around the world, remove sulfur as a gas, liquefy it into elemental sulfur, and ship it at just below 300°F if by truck, or in steam-jacketed rail cars if by train (it has to be heated up and remelted at the destination) to sulfuric acid manufacturers. Most acid plants are located near the refineries. Giant chemical conglomerates DuPont and Rhodia are the leading manufacturers, with their biggest plants in Houston, Texas, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. These acid companies in turn burn the sulfur to get sulfur dioxide (some sulfur dioxide is used to process corn into syrup and starch) and then pass that gas over racks of expensive vanadium catalysts in building-size towers and mix it with water to get sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid is part of the processing of a number of unrelated Twinkie subingredients (phosphoric acid, lactic acid) and one ingredient (artificial vanilla), but contributes sulfur directly only to one: ferrous sulfate.
    At 165 million tons per year, sulfuric acid is the most produced chemical in the world. The United States is the world leader, making about a quarter of that sum. It is so useful that it plays a role in just about everything that’s manufactured, from fertilizers to gasoline, including Twinkies. But the workers at the wells, refineries, acid plants, and steel mills haven’t an inkling that what they’re producing actually ends up in food.
     
    In a Midwestern steel mill, iron ore is baked and reacted into steel and then squeezed into continuous thin sheets up to 1,400 feet long in hot rolling mill lines that look like oversize printing presses. The buildings can stretch to a mile long. A rusty, crusty, oxide scale forms immediately on the surface of the fresh steel and must be removed quickly by what is known as the pickling process, which doesn’t have much to do with vinegar and cucumbers. Still, it is part of a small food chain that links petroleum to a vitamin supplement to nutritious flour. Steel pickling involves running that continuous sheet through sulfuric acid in tubs up to eighty feet long and seven feet wide. The acid is known as the pickle liquor, one liquor that is not recommended for consumption but that plays a key role in making ferrous sulfate for Twinkies.
    At the end of the day, after thousands of feet of steel roll have been run through the tub (impressively named “deep tank technology”) and rolled into the six-foot-wide, seven-foot-diameter rolls you see carried on flatbed trucks, the sulfuric acid has become saturated with iron and is pumped out for separation. Iron sulfate crystals, an iron salt of sulfuric acid, drop to the bottom so that the acid can