"Earl Evleth" wrote
| But a visit to any French grocery store will allow
| one to see junk food which is not American in origin.
| First, what is junk food?? To borrow a term it could
| be food with ³no redeeming nutritional value". So is
| the pornographic equivalent in food.

But nutritional value - and I should hardly have to say this to a French
person - is far from being the only criterion by which we judge food. If it
were, we could all live on nutritionally-balanced little green diet pills.

The mouth is one of the most sensitive parts of the human body (babies
explore things by putting them in their mouths) and food delights our senses
of taste, smell, touch, as well as being attractive visually and having
strong cultural significance.

Whilst some will make claims of the efficacy of antioxidants in tea, the
simple mug of tea has little nutritional value - some sugar, some caffeine,
a little calcium and protein from the milk - yet a cup of tea certainly has
redeeming values beyond its nutritional content. Offering one to a visitor
is way of expressing welcome and an invitation to stay a while longer, or to
a distressed or bereaved person a way of expressing concern and sympathy. A
cup of tea signifies a psychological change of tempo on a work break, the
employee is on his own time not his employer's, and the first cup of tea on
arriving home from work, the end of the working day. To jump to your later
point, it was the Nice Cup Of Tea and a Stiff Upper Lip, and the associated
maintenance of morale, that won us the war.

Junk food, therefore, is not merely food with no redeeming nutritional
value. It isn't even always food with *adverse* nutritional value.

| pain aux raisins, chausson aux pommes, financier,
| pain au chocolat flan, tarte au citron, etc etc.

I wouldn't call any of those junk food. Sweets, fancies, indulgences, but
they are also delicacies, carefully constructed to be savoured, all
representing their location and the time of their origin, just as a steak
and kidney suet pudding says something about a time and place of British
cooking.

Junk food is, IMHO, food that has no redeeming value whatsoever, save
perhaps its calorific value in the most easily consumed form possible. Junk
food is not merely lacking in nutrients - calories are a nutrient in a
sense - but in skill of preparation, theatre of service, texture taste and
aroma of mastication, comfort of digestion ... That is what is junk food.
And why do children want chicken nuggets and burgers? Because the menu is
easy to choose from and it all tastes basically the same anyway. Because the
service is quick and children always want Now! Because you unwrap the food
like presents at christmas, play with the food, eat with the fingers, and
get an instant fat and sugar rush. And no probelms about Elbows On The Table
and Ask Before You Get Down. Because when they go to the burger restaurant
mum and dad pay attention to them, instead of ignoring them and dragging
them round Boring Shops. Children are taught that chicken nuggets and
burgers are desirable treats or rewards for good behaviour.

| My wife is currently working on a medical history project
| dealing with the "diet" of the French curing the occupation
| period. It was an epoch in which the diet was "low calorie"
| because the food eaten, largely vegies, had low calorie
| levels. ...
| Anyway, the non-Germans in Europe during WWII were all
| on a Nazi imposed diet and not having gorilla digestive
| tracts could not make up for it. They were eating junk
| food.

That is interesting. Two TV programmes in Britain, one in the summer and one
only a few weeks ago, put children back on a 1940s or 1950s (food rationing
continued in Britain until the 1950s, I think) diet. The 1950s one sent them
to boarding school 1950s style, with compulsory exercise, and some of them
lost weight but were perfectly healthy - if not more healthy than today's
children. Far from being junk food, many nutritionists think that the
wartime ration diet in Britain, which was carefully designed at the time to
be the minimum on which people could survive - in a much more labour
intensive lifestyle - is still by today's standards a healthy nutritious
diet.

The boarding school programme was called "That'll Teach 'Em" and was
broadcast by www.channel4.com - there may still be info and discussion
boards on the site.

I can understand that the situation faced by the French during the
occupation could have worse on the food front, with perhaps very little fats
and sugars, but I think it's wrong to confuse the effects of junk food - a
surfeit of nutritionally inadequate food consumed *by choice* in preference
to readily available healthy food - with malnutrition caused by restricted
availability of *any* food.

Owain