When: July 21
National Junk Food Day on July 21st is a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the foods designed by food scientists to be as pleasurable as possible — often at the expense of nutritional value. The story of how junk food was created, the science of why it works, and its cultural ubiquity in modern life is one of the most important and unsettling food stories of the 20th century.
"Junk food" as a category was named in 1972 by a nutrition activist — before that, there was no collective term for foods engineered specifically to override your body's satiety signals.
In 1972, a food scientist named Howard Moskowitz was hired by the Campbell Soup Company to determine the optimal amount of salt in a can of soup. Moskowitz ran hundreds of taste tests, graphed the results, and found that there wasn't one optimal level — there were two distinct populations with different preferences. This was a revelation. The food industry had been searching for a single ideal formulation; Moskowitz had demonstrated that the market was segmented and that both segments had to be fed. He went on to do similar work for Pepsi, Vlasic pickles, and eventually Prego pasta sauce, where his analysis prompted the development of "extra chunky" — a product no one had demanded that became the bestselling pasta sauce in the country. Moskowitz called the optimal sensory target the "bliss point": the specific combination of salt, fat, and sugar that activates reward circuitry without triggering the satiation signal that would make you stop eating. Michael Jacobson, founder of the...