Junk food

Monday

July 17, 2023

A new war on obesity is underway

Consume American media for more than five minutes, and sandwiched between advertisements for KFC $5 Fill-Ups and a dramatic Golden Corral short pondering the age-old question, “Chicken tenders or baby back ribs?,” you’re bound to behold at least a half-dozen ads for prescription drugs. They tend to last longer than the straight-to-the-glutton-button fast-food commercials, and they play over and over and over again (who doesn’t know the Oh, Oh, Oh, Ozempic! jingle by now?) — and airtime ain’t cheap. “When Oprah Winfrey’s bombshell interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle aired in March 2021, the British tuned in, and many were gobsmacked at the number of drug commercials they saw,” Vox reported earlier this year.

Monday

October 21, 2019

Molly Jong-Fast

Junk food is my American dream

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. I love junk food in an insane, passionate way. Perhaps this is because I was a fat kid and though I am not a particularly fat adult, my fat kid-ness has never left me. I am firmly of the belief that if you were once a fat kid, it is an indelible state that can never be escaped, much as one might try. The state of fatness during those years made me who I am today. Or perhaps my love of junk food is just one of the things that makes me distinctly American. We Americans love our junk food. One in three eats it every single day and they do it because junk food is delicious and because junk food is largely an American way of life.