The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out our most popular articles of the week on a variety of subjects, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites.

Katie:

Helen Keller & Anne Sullivan Surfaces 120 Years Later

Hallelujah For American Idol, Jeff Buckley and Leonard Cohen

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Nicole:

Google Gives Free Voicemail to San Francisco Homeless

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Turnes 80

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Giulia:

Patrick Swayze’s Cancer Battle

Koby Bryant’s PSA for ASR

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Gina:

Reese’s Empowering Bracelet

“Chop Shop” - Dreams In a Place of Despair

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Kerry:

Bamboo Laptop: Will Apple Be Green with Envy?

The Explosive Truth About Twinkies

There are simple carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, and then there’s the Twinkie, made from military industrial-complex carbohydrates. It’s got some of the same ingredients as tracer bullets and artillery shells, as I learned from reading Steve Ettlinger’s Twinkie, Deconstructed.

Ettlinger’s book, just out in paperback, documents the 39 ingredients it now takes to make a Twinkie, many of them minerals and chemicals, some derived from crude oil. This petroleum-based pastry is about a million food miles removed from your grandma’s yellow sponge cake, which had a shelf life of maybe two days, max.

Today’s Twinkie, on the other hand, stays frighteningly “fresh” for an unnaturally long time (officially, 25 days, but we all know it’s really more like 25 months.) Real butter turns rancid too fast, so the Twinkie gets its butter-like taste and texture from petrochemical-based ingredients like diacetyl, a close cousin to acetylene welding gas, and butyric acid, a flavor which Ettlinger gleefully informs us is “a natural component of Parmesan cheese, rancid butter, and, unbelievably, vomit and perspiration.”

Twinkie, Deconstructed may amaze and appall you, but the fact is that while a Twinkie is not particularly good for you, it’s not all that bad for you, either. It’s just an amalgam of industrial ingredients and artificial flavors posing as an actual pastry. How did we ever fall for this oily oblong cake with the mystery “cream” filling?

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve come a long way, baby: from knuckle-dragging Neanderthals to hairy hunter-gatherers to soda-swilling couch potatoes. But it’s “survival of the fittest,” not the fattest. This YouTube video from Kitchen Gardeners International is intended to inspire us all to drop the chips, pick up a trowel, and get growing.

Learn more about the benefits of growing your own food at kitchengardeners.org.

When I was in high school, I often used the 2 dollars my mother gave me for lunch to buy Cool Ranch Doritos and Goobers. I have a feeling, while the specific junk food may vary, that my meal is one that many teens get from their cafeteria. If federal lawmakers have their say though, kids might not have the option to eat processed sugar and fat for lunch, as Senator Tom Harkin (D) of Iowa is presenting new legislation that would limit vending machines and soda machines in schools.It seems like a no-brainer, of course kids shouldn’t be eating chips and candy for lunch, who would want that? Well, the large food corporations that want their addictive treats available to kids all the time. At the moment, the new standards would limit not what students can eat, but how much they can eat, as The New York Times point out :

The nutrition standards would allow only plain bottled water and eight-ounce servings of fruit juice or plain or flavored low-fat milk with up to 170 calories to be sold in elementary and middle schools. High school students could also buy diet soda or, in places like school gyms, sports drinks. Other drinks with as many as 66 calories per eight ounces could be sold in high schools, but that threshold would drop to 25 calories per eight-ounce serving in five years.Food for sale would have to be limited in saturated and trans fat and have less than 35 percent sugar. Sodium would be limited, and snacks must have no more than 180 calories per serving for middle and elementary schools and 200 calories for high schools.

While some see this as a victory, as the regulations would nix many sugary sodas and sweet treats from cafeterias, others are angry that their isn’t more of an effort really restrict unhealthy foods. They worry that kids will become addicted early on and there unhealthy eating will follow them throughout their life.Give a visit to the The Center for Science in the Public Interest to see some of the efforts out there to ensure our kids don’t survive school on chocolate covered peanuts. But even with these efforts, one thing is for sure, changing folks’ habits in this Fast Food Nation isn’t easy: