Junk food is the catch-all term for things like crisps, sweets, fizzy drinks and fast-food burgers: food that is cheap, convenient and designed to taste good, but offers little in the way of vitamins, fibre or protein once you get past the fat, sugar and salt. The phrase is used both as a straightforward nutritional label and as a mild telling-off, whether aimed at a child’s diet, a works canteen, or one’s own guilty snacking habits.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘junk food’?
The coining of “junk food” is often credited to Michael Jacobson, the founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, around 1972. Research by the etymologist Barry Popik has shown that the phrase was already circulating long before that date. The earliest example Popik found comes from the San Francisco Examiner on 4 January 1940, where Beryl Wallace of Earl Carroll’s Vanities was quoted as saying, “I don’t go in for eating ‘junk’ food.” A further example turned up in the Seattle Times on 5 August 1951, describing the chief dietitian of the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital, Marjorie Gill, as “a foe of what she terms ‘junk food’.”
Jacobson was not the only person to believe they had invented the phrase. The New York magazine food critic Gael Greene used “junk food” regularly from at least 1971 onwards and was convinced she had come up with it herself, a rival claim to Jacobson’s. Given examples from three decades earlier, neither claim to coining the term can really stand.
Popik suggests a more likely explanation for how the phrase spread into everyday use: the long-running syndicated medical column of Dr William Brady, which ran continuously from 1914 until his death in 1972. A column appearing in newspapers across the country for 58 years would have been well placed to popularise a useful piece of nutritional shorthand, even if the exact point at which “junk food” first appeared in print remains the 1940 citation found by Popik rather than any single named coiner.