Junk food: a snob's nightmare (Photo: Getty)
When you hear the words “junk food”, what image comes to mind? I bet it’s greasy hamburgers and chips, maybe fried chicken, pizza, gloopy pink milkshakes, bumper bags of salty crisps, king-size bars of chocolate. But why don’t we think of duck à l’orange, which is easily as fatty as any bag of chips, or foie gras, which is French for “fat liver”, or those posh, fancy Gü chocolate desserts, which are the match of any Mars Bars when it comes to sugar content and calorie count? I’ll tell you why. Because “junk food” is not actually a proper scientific term designed to measure a foodstuff’s dodgy content – rather it’s the term people use to express their disdain and disgust for the eating habits of the lower orders, for all those burger-chompers and chip-eaters who live in “white trash” bits of Britain.
Once again, news reports are telling us there will be a “war on junk food”, as an international group of experts warn of a rising “obesity epidemic”, and once again those news reports are accompanied, not by photos of grinning middle-class folk tucking into rich dishes in a swanky restaurant, but by photos of the podgy working classes, in ill-fitting leggings, licking ice-cream cones or crunching crisps. “Junk food” is codeword for “junk people”. At a time when it is no longer PC to use either of the s-words to describe the lower orders – “scum” or “savages” – snobs are forced to find another way to express their fear and loathing of the strange, unknowable blob that inhabits council estates and inner cities. And they increasingly do it through the issue of food, fantasising that Those People spend all day munching on recklessly unhealthy fare.
That is why in every discussion or shock-horror story about “junk food”, the focus is always, without fail, on working-class communities. From Morgan Spurlock’s film Super Size Me, in which that brave, well-educated New Yorker from the posh Park Slope area of Brooklyn dared to become like “poor folk” by living on nothing but McDonald’s meals, to Jamie Oliver’s various wars on unhealthy school dinners, in which our heroic chef lectured council-estate mums for giving their kids Turkey Twizzlers and even used the phrase “white trash” to describe them, the crusade against junk food never ventures beyond poor communities. It never knocks on the doors of five-star restaurants that serve up deliciously fatty grub or the homes of people who scoff fine steaks washed down with £100 bottles of wine. Why would it? The whole point of the nonsense notion of “junk food” is to make a moralistic distinction between what We eat (good, interesting, exotic food) and what They, the little people, eat: trashy, uninteresting, fast, microwaveable crap.
The story that best captures the bile inherent in the anti-junk food campaign was the time when two mums pushed portions of chips through the school railings at Rawmarsh School in Rotherham. They said they were sick of their children coming home from school hungry, having refused to eat the “rabbit food” served in the lunch hall under Jamie Oliver’s instructions. And so they decided to smuggle in chips for their kids to feast on instead. The women were depicted as the scum of the earth. They were “sinner ladies”, the press said, “like daytrippers feeding animals at the zoo”. All because they dared to ignore the Gospel According to St Jamie.
The expression of snobbery through the issue of food has a long history. As John Carey showed in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, in the early twentieth-century writers and thinkers who were allergic to working-class folk frequently attacked the tinned food consumed by less well-off people. “Tinned food offends against what the intellectual designates as nature: it is mechanical and soulless”, said Carey. They saw tinned food as “an offence against the sacredness of individuality”. And so it is today. For all the spouting of medical statistics and health facts in the jihad against junk food, really it is driven by an elitist view of certain foodstuffs as “soulless”, unnatural, too fast and mass-produced. It is a matter of taste, and class hatred, cunningly disguised as a health campaign.
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