1Interest in food as a culture-specific sign system started (perhaps) with Roland Barthes’ 1961 paper “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption”. Since then, several major treatments of the goals and methods informing a so-called “food semiotics” have come forth, including key studies by Lehrer (1991), Parasecoli (2011), Stano (2015, 2016), and Cavanaugh & Riley (2019), among a number of others. The analysis of fast and junk food has, however, received little attention within this branch, outside of a few works, including those by the present author (Danesi 2016, 2018). The purpose of this paper is focus on what the fast-junk-food phenomenon reveals about the emergence of sign systems in modern, consumerist cultures, which have little or no connection to historical traditions, breaking the diachronic flow of meaning. As Roland Barthes (1957) so cogently argued in another work, such cultures are “throw away” ones, given that the desire for newness is a constant state of mind (which he called “neomania”).
2To reiterate, fast and junk food constitute historical paradoxes. They do not fit in with any food codes of the past, nor did they emerge for reasons of nutrition—on the contrary, they are among the unhealthiest foods consumed on a daily basis. Nevertheless, they have penetrated everyday eating habits deeply, which has led to the emergence of a meaning code that dovetails with other such codes of consumerist modernity. The proof of this is that the codes have produced their own pattern of unconscious symbolic meanings. This was brought out satirically by a 1980 South African movie titled The Gods Must Be Crazy. The plot takes place in a remote African desert, where a tribal society lives a happy and uneventful life, free of the constant desire for newness. This tranquil world is shattered, however, when a Coca-Cola bottle falls one day from an airplane into the midst of the villagers. Not knowing what it was, they immediately interpret it as some divine, magical object sent to them by the gods. As a result, the peace in the village is shattered as the people fight for possession of the bottle. The tribal leader realizes that the only way to restore social harmony is to return the bottle to the gods. So, at the end, he throws the bottle over a cliff. The ironic intent of the movie harbors the same kind of purview of the Frankfurt School scholars of the 1920s, who saw everything in a consumerist culture, from art to food, as based on a commodity mentality.
3There is no question that the phenomenon of fast and junk food could only crystallize in a consumerist world, as the movie and the Frankfurt scholars argued. But as Peirce so cogently argued throughout his writings (Peirce 1931-1958), anything that accrues a social function will spontaneously undergo semiosis (meaning production). Fast and junk food have, in fact, accrued their own set of meanings—a set that has little or no connection to traditional food codes. This paper will focus primarily on fast food, since the junk food phenomenon is related to it in sociosemiotic ways, as will be discussed. The main difference between the two is related to manufacturing—junk food is purely pre-fabricated and packaged food, while fast food is food prepared, literally, in a “fast way”. Together, they can be said to constitute “pop food”, in the sense that they are subsidiary elements in a more general pop culture paradigm.
4Needless to say, survival without food is impossible. But in cultural contexts, food is not only survival substance, but semiotics as well. The types of food eaten regularly, and the ways they are prepared and eaten, invariably take on a whole range of meanings that resonate with a culture’s history and values, as well as symbolizing ethnocultural identity. When we use the term cuisine, we are simultaneously referring to and evaluating those who eat certain food items and cook them in a certain way. It is thus an evaluative code, within and outside of the culture, associated with cultural identity, much like a language (Touissant-Samat 2008, Civitello 2011). It is thus employed often to evaluate otherness, which may result in stereotypical ways to do so (Greco 2016). As archeology has documented, this type of food symbolism was unlikely to be the case in early hominid groups. The earliest people ate whatever food they could find, and if the food supply in an area ran out, the group would move on (Bescherer Metheny & Beaudry 2015). Food was primarily survival substance. Over time, as people learned to make fire, and to live in larger social enclaves, they started roasting some of their food over burning wood from fires. After learning how to make pots and other cooking utensils, they also started to boil and stew food.
5As Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964) has famously argued, true culture emerges with the advent of such “cooking technology”, transforming the course of human history. He claimed that this was accomplished by three processes—roasting, boiling, and smoking. Roasting is more primitive than boiling or smoking because it implies a direct contact between the food and a fire. Boiling reveals an advanced form of cooking, since the process in this case is mediated by a pot. It also implies the sharing of food in a community. Finally, to this “culinary triangle” Lévi-Strauss added the smoking of meat, which clearly implies a further advancement. With his approach, Lévi-Strauss established a core semiotic principle—the distinction between the raw and the cooked. The former envisions food as pure survival substance; the latter transforms it into semiotic substance. It constitutes what Barthes (1957) called a “second-order semiological system” (Engl. trans. 1972, p. 113), that is a system of culturally-coded meanings that project food items into the symbolic order of a culture.
6When especially favorable food sources became available, the early humans settled in permanent, year-round communities, learning to domesticate plants and animals for food, transportation, clothing, and other uses. With greater population concentrations and permanent living sites, cultural institutions developed, united by communal ceremonies and culinary patterns. Food thus became a part of ritual and symbolism. To this day, it is a primary constituent of all kinds of ceremonies and rituals, from feasts (weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and so on) to simple social gatherings, such as birthday parties. We schedule “breakfast”, “lunch”, and “dinner” events on a daily basis to mark both the passage of time and to cater to biological needs. Each one produces symbolic meanings that are culturally-constrained—as a result, the food items that are eaten at each one will vary in a patterned way. Even going out on a romantic date would typically involve an eating component associated with this courtship ritual.
7Edibility is, thus, more a product of culture than of nature. Outside of those foods that have a demonstrably harmful effect on the human organism, the species of flora and fauna that are considered to be edible or inedible are very much the result of history and tradition. We cannot get nourishment from eating tree bark, grass, or straw. But we certainly could get it from eating frogs, ants, earthworms, silkworms, lizards, and snails. Most people in contemporary Anglo-American culture would, however, respond negatively at the thought of eating such potential food items. However, there are cultures where they are not only eaten for nourishment, but also as part of cultural traditions. The expression “to develop a taste” for some “foreign” food reveals how closely tied edibility is to cultural perception. Unfortunately, we might also perceive gustatory differences in cuisine as fundamental differences in worldview—as differences between “us” and “them”. It is interesting to note, however, that when people come to accept the cuisine of others as not only tasty but as a delicacy, the culture of the food-makers concomitantly takes on greater importance.
8The fact that specific types of food produce interpretations and reactions (even physiological ones) is brought out by a famous anecdote told about the Polish-American scholar, Alfred Korzybski (cited in Derks & Hollander 1996, p. 58), the founder of general semantics (Korzybski 1921, 1933). It is reported that one day, as Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, he suddenly stopped talking to retrieve a packet of biscuits from his briefcase, telling the class that he was very hungry and needed to eat something right away. He then asked several students in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few took one each, eating in front of him. Korzybski then asked: “Nice biscuit, don’t you think?”. He then ripped the white packet paper which contained the biscuits, revealing inside a picture of a dog’s head and the tagline Dog Biscuits. The students were visibly upset at seeing this, and a few put a hand in front of their mouths running to the toilet. Korzybski then remarked: “You see, I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter”. Korzybski’s little game was a thought experiment designed to bring out the importance of the relation between semiosis, the mind, and the body. When we hear a word such as spaghetti we might think of Italians, Wiener Schnitzel of Germans, and sushi of Japanese. These are not just arbitrary labels for food items; they also encode social and ethnic connotations as well as gustatory reactions by suggestion.
9A core objective of food semiotics is to analyze and explain how food is interconnected with its various types of symbolism, traditions, and identities (Lehrer 1991; Stano 2015). Food is a langue, to use Saussure’s (1916) well-known term, a system of signifying structures that cohere into a meaning-making code; while the actual rituals of eating constitute parole, or the ways in which the code is used and shapes eating rituals. Take, for example, bread. We talk of the “bread of life”, of “earning our bread”, and so on because, as in many other cultures, bread is felt unconsciously to be a symbol for life itself—a sense that we have undoubtedly absorbed through cultural narratives, religious rites, and so on. As Sara Covin Juengst (1992) has cogently argued, bread allows us to reconstruct some of the fundamental ideas of early religious practices, indicating that “food is woven as intricately as faith into the fabric of our lives” (Palmer 1992, p. 11). Many of the symbolic-historical meanings of food, in fact, derive from narrative accounts of human origins. The story of Adam and Eve in the Bible, for instance, revolves around the eating of a forbidden fruit. The representation of this fruit as an apple comes from medieval pictorial representations of the Eden scene. Since then, the Biblical symbolism of the apple as “forbidden knowledge” continues to resonate in our culture. This is why the apple tree symbolizes the “tree of knowledge”; why the “Apple” computer company has probably chosen this fruit for its company name and logo, and so on. The discovery and cultivation of the apple dates back to 6500 BCE in Asia Minor. Ramses II of Egypt cultivated apples in orchards along the Nile in the thirteenth century BCE. The Ancient Greeks also cultivated apple trees from the seventh century BCE onwards. They designated the apple “the golden fruit”, since in Greek mythology it was given to Hera from the Garden of the Hesperides as a wedding present when she married Zeus. Bread and apples are not just food substances; they are food codes in themselves.
10The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) saw food as a form of differentiated expressivity, pointing to both a refined (sacred) culture (via cuisine and etiquette) and a profane carnivalesque culture. In the latter, food is eaten without etiquette or social manners. This allows participants at a carnival to subvert the meanings of food, disrupting traditional meanings and abolishing idealized social forms of etiquette, bringing out the crude, unmediated links between domains of behavior that are normally kept separate. The word carnival, incidentally, derives from Italian carnevale, which in turn derives from Latin carne (“meat”) + vale (“to have value”), indicating that the body and its desires also have value and must be allowed to gain expression.
11Among the first to notice the symbolic importance of food was the Greek historian Herodotus in his Histories (430 BCE). Herodotus spent a large part of his life traveling through Asia, Babylon, Egypt, and other regions, noting and recording for posterity the differences he perceived (with respect to Athenian culture) in the language, dress, food, etiquette, legends, and rituals of the people he came across. The annotations he made constitute the first significant accounts of the cultures of virtually the entire ancient Middle East, including those of the Scythians, Medes, Persians, Assyrians, and Egyptians. Inspired by Herodotus, other ancient historians also made it a point to describe systematically and comparatively the cultures of the peoples they visited. As these ancient proto-anthropologists discovered, in a social ambiance food takes on significance that transcends its basic survival function, affecting perceptions of its edibility. Food blends in naturally with social organization (the times when it is eaten), beliefs (the meanings of specific food items), and other aspects of communal life (such as developing a code of eating). It is, in other words, a fundamental element for unlocking the overall “code” of a culture, as Lévi-Strauss (1964) maintained. As such, it forms a behavioral regulatory system—that is, it regulates what kinds of food are eaten typically in cultural context, when they are eaten, who is allowed to eat them, and so on and so forth. In his gastronomy treatise, The Physiology of Food (1825), Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin made the following apt observation: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are” (Eng. trans. 1971, p. 15).
12Fast food, as we understand that term today, is not an evolutionary offshoot of any existent food code; nor can it be considered to be a type of modern-day cuisine. It is connected primarily with modern-day lifestyles and technologies, which have made its production efficient and massive, and thus affordable to everyone. Appliances and devices such as the gas stove, the refrigerator, toasters, microwave ovens, frying pans, can openers, mixers, aerosol cans, and the like have made the consumption of such food an everyday reality, linking it functionally to the fast-paced lifestyles of modern urban societies—hence the term “fast” food. The two (fast food and lifestyle) move constantly in tandem, towards least effort and rapidity. The expression “quick and easy” can thus be used colloquially as a social principle that characterizes contemporary urban living.
13This principle is consistent with the views of the Frankfurt School (for example, Horkheimer & Adorno 1972) as well as critics of consumerist cultures such as Barthes (1957), Jean Baudrillard (1983) and Jürgen Habermas (1987), who have claimed that such cultures operate mainly in the service of economic efficiency and mass productivity. Everything becomes a discardable commodity. The semiotic connection with the traditional past has become weakened, including the meanings of fast food. For this reason, the rules of the “fast food code” are Bakhtinian, in the sense that they do not involve etiquette or well-defined table manners. In a phrase, fast food meaning falls outside any and all previous traditions of eating and cuisines.
14The origins of fast food, as this term is understood today, are traced to post-colonial America when the country became increasingly affluent, and people sought new urban lifestyles, including recreation. This led eventually to the birth of an entertainment culture. Among the first to lead the way was the entrepreneur, showman, and circus operator P.T. Barnum, whose posters proclaimed pleasure and delights at his “Greatest Show on Earth”, as Barnum called his circus, founded as the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1871. As people went to the circus in large numbers, food stands started appearing at circus gates, offering cheap, tasty, and quickly prepared foods, such as hot dogs, America’s version of Germany’s frankfurters. By the end of the nineteenth century, such quickly-produced foods moved from the circus into the parks, becoming the standard fare at baseball stadia, at fairs, and at amusement parks. Fast-prepared food became more acceptable socially, with the advent of the automobile, as roadside diners serving hot dogs, hamburgers, and the like started cropping up throughout America in the 1920s. The origin of fast food culture is, thus, connected with America’s break from its Puritan lineage. As a result, its “interpretant” (as Peirce called the effect a specific sign form will evoke) varies significantly. The fact that we react in different ways to turkey dinners at Thanksgiving and to the consumption of hot dogs at baseball games—both meat products—bears this out.
15The use of food stands to sell food at specific events is not an American invention—it is actually an ancient practice. In Rome, food stands called popinas, offering bread and vegetables, were found in many cities. In twelfth-century China, soups and stuffed buns were sold at various stands in major towns. During the Middle Ages, in large cities such as London and Paris, street vendors sold pies, wafers, pastries, and pre-cooked meats in kiosks, catering mainly to people who did not have the means to cook their own food. Travelers, such as pilgrims going to a holy site, were also customers of the kiosks. But it was not until Barnum’s America that fast food stands became part of a self-styled business all its own and the food prepared and served there emerging as a modern-day food code based on the principle above. As the foods migrated to society generally, especially after the economic boom of the 1920s, a veritable fast food industry took shape. By the 1950s, fast food consumption had become a cultural reality, given that busy working families came to expect quick service and cheap food for both lunch and dinner, or else having the capacity to prepare such food themselves in rapid time. Fast food was no longer an option for a busy family, but an ever-broadening necessity.
16One of the first fast-food options that spread broadly was the sandwich, becoming highly popular during the 1920s as a self-contained meal for people on the run. The sandwich traces its origin to previous eras and to a different country, but in America it became one of the first symbols of an expanding fast food culture. Food historians generally attribute the creation of the modern sandwich to John Montague, Fourth Earl of Sandwich in 1762. The story goes that during a day of constant gambling, the Earl ordered his cook to prepare him food in such a way that it would not disrupt his gambling marathon. The cook thus introduced the sandwich, prepared with sliced meat between two pieces of bread. This ready-made meal required no utensils and could be eaten while doing something else—gambling (Wilson 2010). Another legend goes that Montague himself had come across the sandwich during one of his trips to the Eastern Mediterranean, where he saw small stuffed pita breads served in the public squares. Whatever the truth, the fact is that Montague made this repast popular among England’s gentry. References to sandwiches began to appear in English literature during the 1760s, typically portrayed as something consumed primarily by men during late night drinking parties. But it was in the 1920s that the modern-day meanings of the sandwich coalesced. During the early years of railroad travel, for example, sandwiches proved to be an ideal form of fast food, sold at train stations when people got off and on. Along with other fast foods, the sandwich changed the psychology (and meaning) of eating. Convenience and tastiness became unconscious principles of food consumption. Sandwiches even began to replace entire meals, especially at lunchtime, avoiding the need to carry cooking utensils about. Their popularity increased as the distances between home and work increased by the 1930s. Eating a sandwich requires no crockery, cutlery, and in most situations no table manner rituals.
17Today, sandwich houses are everywhere, indicating that it has become the “lunch fare” par excellence. Sandwiches are given to school children for lunch, prepared for picnics, eaten on bus trips, and so on and so forth. Special restaurants offer sandwiches as part of delicatessen fare. Corned beef, Reuben, ham & cheese, veggie sandwiches, are now part of a common fast food gastronomy, which has spread to all levels of society; as a result, the sandwich is no longer perceived to be a fast food, but simply a food item eaten by one and all (prepared quickly and easily). Already in a 1924 article published in The New York Times, the following relevant remark was made:
Before the war you could not get away with the idea that a sandwich was enough lunch for a business man. But somehow they have come to the conviction that a light lunch is the best thing if they expect to go back to the office and do their best during the afternoon. They have heard, too, that salads are good for you and so they have tried them out and felt much better for the experiment. Salads and sandwiches—they are the style for a business man’s lunch today. That is what they want and that is what they get.
18Similar stories could be told about other fast foods. Cupcakes, for instance, became a staple fast food item at the start of the 1920s, although the recipe is found for the first time in 1796 in a famous cookbook, American Cookery, written by Amelia Simmons, who describes it as “a light cake to bake in small cups”. The donut was introduced to America early in the twentieth century by Dutch settlers. But it did not catch on, given the lack of efficient technology to produce the pastry on a large scale. All this changed at the start of the 1920s, when a refugee from Russia named Adolph Levitt invented the first donut-making machine, capable of producing 80 donuts per hour. Bakeries started buying the machines en masse, as curious customers watched as the donuts came out of them (Hunwick 2015). At the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago, donuts were proclaimed to be “the food hit of the Century of Progress”, produced “automatically”.
19As one last example of the rise and spread of fast food, consider Campbell’s Soup, which has become, along with the donut and other fast food items, a symbol of fast food culture (Shea & Mathis 2002) The Campbell’s Soup Company was the world’s first producer of canned soup, already by the latter part of the nineteenth century. It initiated a highly successful advertising campaign to get the message across in 1904 that the soup could be prepared quickly and easily and that it had all the nutritional value of homemade soup. By the 1920s, as homemakers started going out of the home more and more, either for work or leisure activities, the option of canned soup became increasingly attractive. The orange-colored soup can quickly evolved into an icon of American fast food culture, immortalized as such by pop artist Andy Warhol, who created perhaps his most famous series of silkscreens of the soup can in 1962. The soup company was upset at Warhol at first. Eventually, it realized that the silkscreens had engrained the can into American folklore. In 2004, the company even released a limited-edition series of the cans that were inspired by Warhol’s paintings.
20As the fast food industry was taking shape, a complementary take-out culture also gained a foothold, leading to new manufacturing initiatives, with consequential and currently negative ecological implications—including the use of throw-away plastic ware and paper cups. In 1908, a Kansas health official named Samuel Crumbine observed that tuberculosis could be passed on from person to person by drinking from the cup of an infected person. As the spreading of germs became a nation-wide concern after World War I, the paper cup was invented around 1919 (called originally the “Health Cup”) in response to Crumbine’s warning. After World War II, plastic came to the forefront as the material for the manufacturing of throw-away cups, cutlery, and so on. As this side-story of fast food culture implies, the disposable food-service products of today trace their origin to a combination of health worries and a burgeoning take-out culture in the 1920s. The environmental dangers posed by these products, together with pollution generally, has become one of the most critical problems today.
21Exacerbating the problem is that fast food is now a global phenomenon. The take-out locales that are found throughout the entire world are among the most common types of eateries, having even become become family restaurants, with many chains serving standardized food fares. Fast foods are perceived, globally, as quick alternatives to the traditional home-cooked meals, reflecting a modern-day lifestyle based on “fast living, “fast eating”, and “fast anything”. Everyone knows that they are high in saturated fats, sugar, salt, and calories, and thus a major public health problem, yet they are eaten constantly because, in a phrase, they are “tasty and easy to eat”. The traditional everyday family dinner has become almost an anachronism in a world where “fastness” and “quick turnovers” are the guiding principles of lifestyle. Eating “on the run”, which would have been perceived as “insane” in previous eras, is now commonplace.
22It should be mentioned that meals prepared quickly, easily, and eaten conveniently were just as common in the early history of America as they are today, as food historians have discussed (Oliver 2005). But the meals did not consist of what we now classify as fast food (hot dogs, hamburgers, etc.). The early colonists were confronted with gathering and preparing foods that were different from those they had left behind in England. Women were both homemakers and outside workers, working in the fields and doing all kinds of chores. So, a quickly-prepared meal for a busy colonial woman was not an exception, but a rule—outside of celebratory dinners, such as Thanksgiving. As Henry Wansey, a traveler from England, wrote in a 1794 entry in his journal, “for the Americans know the value of time too well to waste it at the table”. The American desire for quickness in food preparation and consumption was likely pioneered by the colonial cooks. Cuisine was a luxury of the rich and morally corrupt, not of the humble and religious settlers. But the food prepared and eaten then was hardly of the kind that was sold and consumed at circuses and amusement parts near the end of the nineteenth century. It was “quickly prepared food” not “fast food” in the modern sense.
23Since the 1920s, America has become a “Fast Food Nation”, as Eric Schlosser has characterized it: “Fast food is now so commonplace that it has acquired an air of inevitability, as though it were somehow unavoidable, a fact of modern life” (Schlosser 2001, p. 23). Sociologist George Ritzer referred to the spread of fast food as a process of “McDonaldization” (Ritzer 1993), which he defined as the process when “the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of recent ideas about the worldwide homogenization of cultures due to globalization” (Ibid., new ed. 2010, p. 4). In line with the principle of efficiency above, Ritzer and subsequent social critics have observed that McDonaldization has spread to other areas of life, including education and media, with a clear shift from quality to quantity, as standardization and efficiency continue to play significant roles in the organization and conduct of modern-day life and its institutions.
24Let us turn the clock back hypothetically to the early 1800s, when Halloween in America was a holiday based on neighborly get-togethers and household parties for children. Let us imagine what kinds of foods would be served at those parties, which would have included nutritious snacks such as apples and pumpkin pies. By the 1920s, the centuries-old tradition of trick-or-treating was revived in America, as a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to make food available to children of all classes and economic means. Again, the treats handed out would invariably be fruits and homemade cooking.
25Now, let turn the clock forward to today and ask ourselves: What foods do we hand out at Halloween? The answer is that the treats consist typically of candy bars, chocolates, bags of potato chips, candy suckers, peanuts, licorice sticks, twizzlers, twinkies, and anything that is wrapped safely and produced commercially in massive ways. If we were to hand out fruits and other traditional Halloween treats today, there is a high likelihood that the children would be disappointed. “Junk food”, as it is now called, spread by the early 1950s as a treat not only for children, but also for adolescents, dovetailing with the rise of a distinct “teenager” culture, to which it was aimed directly. As the teenagers became adults, they took the junk food delights along with them, spreading them broadly, By the 1970s, candies, chocolate bars, potato chips, and the like became guilty pleasures for everyone and anyone. It was in 1972, in fact, that Michael Jacobson, the director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a warning about the health effects connected with such manufactured products (Choi & Han 2013).
26Junk food is truly an anomaly with regard to all previous food codes. It is not consumed at meals, but rather as snack food or in response to some hunger urge or desire, recalling the Korzybski anecdote above. The substantive difference between fast and junk food is that the former is cooked (usually), whereas the latter is manufactured in an assembly-line fashion, and packaged to be sold in stores and elsewhere as single consumable items. Fast food also varies somewhat according to who cooks it, whereas junk food does not since it is manufactured homogeneously. There is thus, today, a fast food cuisine; but there is no counterpart when it comes to junk food. There is such a thing as a “good hamburger”, but there is no such thing as “good junk food”, only tasty or tastier. Hamburger is beef and eating beef has always been a common occurrence. But whereas a beefsteak is part of the historical food paradigm of some societies, hamburger is not. Only a few decades ago, hamburgers were hardly construed as part of any cuisine. That situation has changed gradually, with fast food eateries spreading globally. Hamburger is now a food option for people of any age or class. In a phrase, a fast food can become part of a “food norm”; junk food cannot and can only remain a snack food. Any fast food item can be reconceptualized in the same way as hamburger. Take fried chicken. It is part of traditional southern American cuisine where it would hardly be classified as fast food. But in the context of a Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food outlet, it is reconceptualized accordingly.
27It should be noted, however, that in the social media world, this categorical dichotomy between fast and junk food may be more tenuous, given that influencers on various platforms now promote so-called gourmet junk food recipes, emphasizing how extensive the pop food world has become, promoted via apps, blogs, websites, and the like. This revision of the meaning of junk food via the Internet dovetails with the vegan trend; indeed, the label of “junk food vegan” has gained traction within, mainly via social media promotion. What can be said here is that cyberspace is shattering all kinds of traditions and notions; but these tend to be ephemeral, and thus unlikely to embed themselves more broadly.
28In sum, junk food is a purely consumerist commodity, with no historical ties to any cuisine, and thus constituting a veritable break from semiotic culinary traditions. In early teenage culture during the 1950s, the fast-food eatery became a ritualistic space where peers congregated to enact various age-based social agendas, from courtship and romance to the forging of group allegiances and inter-group power plays. Junk food was part of the same ritualistic scene—as a “cool” snack that even defined the age group socially.
29Food semiotics studies how food substance becomes semiotic substance (Danesi 1995). The unusual aspect of fast food and, certainly, of junk food is that they are semiotic artifacts dovetailing with the emergence of consumerist societies, not continuations or evolutions of previous food codes; in fact, they symbolize such societies, having become integral parts, as can be seen throughout pop art and pop culture representations. The phenomenon of fast-junk-food tells, therefore, an important side-story of the formation of modernity, and its break with the traditions of the past. It emerged to fit in, artifactually, with a society in which amusement, quickness, and facility became paramount at the threshold of the twentieth century. Given the world we now live in, where artifactuality is installing itself more and more, the future of food itself is becoming more and more indistinguishable from the future of fast food.
30America has been often been criticized for its marketplace and bottom-line solution to human problems. But America is no longer unique in this, as evidenced by the global spread of the fast food phenomenon, suggesting that the quick-and-easy mindset may in fact be based on an innate principle, often called the principle of least effort. As the space program has shown, packaged and prepared food during space travel is the only viable option for astronauts; and it has also shown that such food need not be devoid of nutritional value. The question of what to eat on the basis of how it can be prepared has been a common one throughout the history of exploration. Land and sea explorers had to solve the problem of how best to preserve and prepare food for their journeys into the unknown. From the travel diaries, we read that they carried dried foods and foods preserved in brine or salt. In space travel, technology has allowed astronauts to come up with analogous solutions, but with refrigeration and canning options that were not possible, of course, in the history of previous exploration forays on earth. The first meal in space was eaten by astronaut John Glenn aboard the spaceship called Friendship 7 in 1962, seven years before the first landing on the moon. Glenn’s meal consisted of applesauce in a tube and sugar tablets with water. Early space travel employed this type of food preparation, with blended foods packed into tubes and sucked through a straw. Included on the tube-meal menu were pureed beef, vegetables, and various fruit juices. In the zero-gravity of space, astronauts exert less energy in carrying out work than if they were on earth. So, they are allotted only 2500 calories a day during space missions, less than a normal intake of 3000 calories.
31Most meals on a shuttle or in a space station look like TV dinners, eaten from a tray heated in a microwave-style device. Conventional eating utensils are used, such as knives, forks, and spoons and the empty trays are discarded in a trash compartment. Astronauts have reported that this way of eating functions well. A full meal can be prepared in 5 minutes. All this suggests that the fast food experiment may pave the path for the future of food both on earth and in space.
32But there have been reactions in the form of movements against fast food culture. One of these has been the “slow food” movement—a term that stands intentionally in opposition to “fast food”. The movement was founded in Italy in 1986, spreading throughout the world shortly thereafter. As an alternative to fast food culture and spread it seeks to promote regional and traditional cuisines that are based on local ecosystems. The main objectives of the movement are the promotion of sustainable (rather than discardable) foods, local small food businesses, and the preparation of food that is “slow” and based on local gastronomies. The movement espouses a political agenda that is directed against fast food empires (the McDonaldization of the world) and their ability to disintegrate local cultures, as well as constituting a form of environmentalism. Significantly and symbolically the movement was sparked as a resistance to the opening of a McDonald’s eatery near the Spanish Steps in Rome in 1986. Three years later, a founding manifesto for an International Slow Food movement was signed in Paris by delegates from fifteen countries.
33While fast food stands for Americanization, industrialization, and globalization, slow food stands for local and traditional food production. The organization now has over 150 delegate countries and nearly 1500 chapters; each one has a leader who is responsible for promoting local gastronomies and agricultural events, such as farmers’ markets. Their mission is expressed on their website as follows:
Slow Food envisions a world in which all people can access and enjoy food that is good for them, good for those who grow it and good for the planet. Our approach is based on a concept of food that is defined by three interconnected principles: good, clean and fair: good: quality, flavoursome and healthy food; clean: production that does not harm the environment; fair: accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for producers (https://slowfoodglasgow.co.uk/Slow-Food-Glasgow#:~:text=Our%20Philosophy,%3A%20good%2C%20clean%20and%20fair).
34In a sense, the Slow Food movement harkens back to the criticism of the Frankfurt School with regards to capitalism itself as a commodity-based system where everything from music to food is commoditized to be sold quickly and discarded just as quickly. However, as in all areas of human life, changes are occurring in fast food culture, based more and more on science and new adaptations. For now, the meanings of fast food and junk food revolve around a code of commodification, based on fastness and discardability. As Allison Pearlman (2015) has noted, all this indicates a shift in “foodability” that parallels similar shifts in all areas of popular culture. She also argues that such food is now becoming its own haute cuisine, whereby a gourmet chef prepares their own specialty burgers or tacos. As she puts it, haute has blurred with “homey cuisine” of the past, because of the process of “casualization” throughout society and the world, as can be seen not only in casual foods but casual forms of dress and manners. Fast food codes and junk food as well are indexes in the semiotic sense, pointing to new types of existential relations in a society.
35The discussion of fast food in this paper started with the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. In an imaginary sense, society has reached the cliff at the “end of the world” and is faced with the same option of the tribal chief of throwing the bottle (and by extension fast food experiment) over the cliff and going back nostalgically in time to a world of supposed peace and harmony, or else moving forward to a new world-based food culture. The latter has actually already installed itself everywhere, with multicultural dining now a common feature of cities and towns across most of the world. The movie was a huge success and critically acclaimed as a cautionary tale. The warnings it bears are, however, still real—a life that is based on fastness is in the end a life in need of adjustment.
36The solutions to nutritional problems associated with fast food culture are not as simple as those proposed by the Slow Food movement, which essentially wants to turn back the clock. The world we live in is a complicated and complex one. But this does not mean that we should not worry about the adverse effects of junk foods and about the kind of uber-consumerist society that produces them. As the famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith (2000, p. 21) once put it:
Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.
37In Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes argued semi-ironically that steak and fries are essential to French identity: “Like wine, steak is in France a basic element, nationalized even more than socialized…Commonly associated with chips, steak communicates its national glamor to them: chips are nostalgic and patriotic like steak” (Engl. trans. 1972, p. 63). This suggests that any food item can become an indexical sign of identity, implying that even fast food today has evolved into such an indexical code. As mentioned, it was in his essay, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” (1961, Engl. trans. 1997), shortly thereafter, that Barthes introduced the idea that food is not just for eating; it is “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior” (Ibid., p. 29). He states that bread is not just bread, different types signify different situations. Our food choices make a statement all of their own. He identifies three main groups of values—commemorative, anthropological, and health. The snack bar, he claims, meets peoples’ fast paced lives. He concludes that as culture changes food tastes do as well, shaping culture and lives. There is little doubt that fast food and junk food culture have done exactly that.
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