The Twinkie Book

I finally read the Twinkie book (Twinkie, Deconstructed). I put it off and then was going to read it again and then got distracted by Takeshi Kovacs...so I finally got around to it.
There were parts of it I liked very much. Going into detail on the ingredients seemed was very interesting-but to me, the author could have used this as a real springboard into looking at the food-industrial complex. Unfortunately, he did not. Instead, there seemed to be a "I'm a New York intellectual and here I am, thousands of feet below the surface of the earth! Look how curious I am!" It was a little odd, when he kept calling iron and baking soda "rocks", as in "We're eating rocks! Can you believe it? Well, I'd never eat rocks because I'd never eat a Twinkie but all you other people out there who DO eat Twinkies are eating rocks!". All I could think was, could you AT LEAST call them minerals?" You know, the stuff that our bodies need to survive? At least he does say how much we need salt and iron (rocks!) but the rest of it very much has a "I can't believe we can do this" and "I can't believe you people eat this" attitude. That attitude was off-putting, even when the information was very interesting. And speaking of the information...okay, so he couldn't get into any vitamin factory and other places as well. I fully understand trade secrets and industrial spying. But aside from that, he seemed to show no real curiousity beyond the Twinkie ingredients and the history behind them. i know, that sounds like he IS curious, and to an extent, he is. But to not look at the high-fructose corn syrup plant and not be curious about the other places it goes...and high-fructose corn syrup is the tramp of the food industry-it's been with everything. I wish that instead of the "wow, look how highly-processed this food is" he would have taken a closer look at the why we do it rather than the how.
But maybe that's a different book. This one was interesting if you don't expect too much.