Andrew F. Smith
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF JUNK FOOD AND FAST FOOD
400pp. Greenwood. £47.95 (US $85).
978 0 313 33527 3
Unwholesome, unnatural, overhyped and overpackaged, junk food is everything that home-cooked food is not. That is both its joy and its horror. The greatest appeal of junk food is that it represents a liberation from the sometimes stifling control of the household kitchen. It requires no cutlery and plates, no rigid mealtimes, no pleases and thank yous. Junk food is the antithesis of “eat up your greens” – eaten on the hoof, away from prying eyes, with no concern for either nutritional values or family duty. It would almost be feasible to argue that junk food is a utopian food in its simple fulfilment of human desires – were it not for its horrible consequences, both for consumers and producers, and for the fact that most of it tastes so nasty.
Back in the mid-1990s, it was still possible to revere junk food, uncomplicatedly, as a thing of wonder. The films of Quentin Tarantino, especially Pulp Fiction (1994), were entranced by the kitsch charms of mass-produced rubbish. The Uma Thurman character in that film devours a “$5 milkshake” while Samuel L. Jackson discourses on the differences between McDonald’s in France and in the United States in his famous “Royale with Cheese” dialogue. A decade on, such reverence seems odd. All discussions of junk food must take place, now, in the shadow of Shlosser and Spurlock: Eric Shlosser’s book Fast Food Nation (2001) and Morgan Spurlock’s film Super Size Me (2004), which, together, took most of the magic out of junk food, and associated it with obesity, vomiting, sinister flavour scientists, miserable chickens and unhappy workers.
This may explain the slightly conflicted tone of Andrew F. Smith’s Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food. On the one hand, Smith (a distinguished food historian, who has written admirable histories of popcorn, ketchup and peanuts) finds fast food alluring. Like many baby-boom Americans, he has had “a love affair with fast food” – in his case, ever since his first trip to McDonald’s, in 1955, aged nine. On the other hand, Smith is keen to stress his “deep concern” with “the effects fast food and junk have upon the United States and the World”. Hence, alongside entries for Kool-Aid, French Fries and the Baby Ruth candy bar are those for Obesity, Diabetes and Exploitation (though not for Trans Fats, Additives or Colouring).
Smith finds the roots of junk food in the dislocation of American life after the Civil War, when rapid industrialization combined with cheaper agricultural prices to create a market for more highly processed food. Though the term itself was not coined until the 1960s, the “first commercially successful junk food”, according to Smith, was Cracker Jack, a mixture of popcorn, molasses and peanuts invented by German immigrants, Frederick and Louis Rueckheim, in 1896. It had its antecedents in the nuts and popcorn which had been sold at fairs from pushcarts throughout the nineteenth century. The difference with Cracker Jack – apart from being much more sugary – was that it was backed up with a powerful advertising campaign, aimed largely at children. By 1916, twenty years after it was launched, Cracker Jack was the best-selling confection in the world. Each box came with a little toy inside, the ancestor of the baubles given away in Happy Meals. Cracker Jack was sold at circuses, fairs and sporting events such as baseball games. Jack Norworth featured it in the lyrics to “Take me Out to the Ball Game”: “Buy me some peanuts and cracker-jack – I don’t care if I never get back”. All the crucial elements of junk food were already there in Cracker Jack: the empty calories, the catchy name, the cheap promotional giveaways and the aggressive marketing. Smith shows how the same pattern recurred time and again, with doughnuts, candy bars, soft drinks and breakfast cereals.
For British readers, this book may seem too biased in favour of American junk. Smith has entries for Dr Pepper but no Vimto; Good & Plenty but no Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts; Goldfish crackers but no Custard Creams; Lifesavers but not Polos; Cheetos but not Wotsits; M & Ms but not Smarties. (The book does include fish and chips, though these are arguably not junk at all, but a fine and nutritious meal, equivalent to the salt cod fritters of Italy and Portugal.) Still, given the transfer of American junk food across the world, perhaps the emphasis on the States is justified. In its countless interesting details, this volume provides a valuable record of the decline of the American diet over the twentieth century, with the transition from junk food as an occasional treat to junk food as a replacement for real food. There is a fine entry on “gross-out candy”, a new phenomenon of deliberately revolting confectionary; and a coolly disturbing account of hamburgers:
People have been scraping and shredding beef for millennia, but it was not until the invention of the meat grinder in the mid-nineteenth century that ground meat became a common food. Ground beef had the advantage of combining meat, fat and organs into a palatable concotion.The disadvantage was that virtually anything could be added to the mix, including adulterants, food colorings and other obnoxious contents.
Smith confirms that, with junk food, the joy and the horror are never far apart.
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Bee Wilson is writing a history of food adulteration. She is the author of The Hive: The story of the honeybee and us, 2004.
