Each year on July 21st we observe National Junk Food Day. This day is dedicated to the foods that everyone loves to snack on. Junk foods by definition are usually high in fats, sugars, salt, and calories and contain very little nutritional value.
With the advent of packaged foods during the late 1800s, junk food made its way into American life. Still, home-cooked meals remained the standard for several more decades. It wasn’t until after World War II that industry took off and began producing products at an increased rate. From the frozen food aisle to fast food chains, there became a myriad of choices for consumers to choose from. Potato chips, baked goods and so much more became available, prepackaged and ready to go.
By the 1970s, junk foods were given a name and a bad one, too. Michael Jacobson, a microbiologist, is credited with coining the phrase and set out to curb our appetite for the high sugar, high salt, high preservative foods Americans were consuming at an alarming rate.
- Americans eat 13 billion hamburgers each year, which is enough to circle the earth more than 32 times.
- A single fast-food hamburger can contain meat from hundreds, or even thousands, of different cattle.
- Four out of five children recognize the McDonald’s logo by the time they are three years old, which is before some of them know their own names.
- Over 1 billion pizzas are delivered in the United States every year. More pizzas are delivered on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year.
- Chick-fil-A sells more than 1.64 billion chicken nuggets every year. That would be more than 5 nuggets for each person in the U.S
- The number of jars of Nutella sold in a year could cover the Great Wall of China eight times
- Chicken meat is not the main ingredient in chicken nuggets. Rather, the main ingredients are fat, epithelium, bone, and nerve and connective tissue.
- The term “junk food” was initially used in the 1960s but was popularized during the following decade when the song “Junk Food Junkie” reached the top of the charts in 1976.
- The Twinkie derived its name after bakery manager Jimmy Dewar saw an advertisement for the “Twinkle Toe Shoe Company” on a trip to St. Louis in the 1920s. They became the best selling snack cake in the United States after WWII and have appeared in many movies such as Ghostbusters (1984), Grease (1978), and Sleepless in Seattle (1993).
- The average American eats over 4 pounds of potato chips a year.
- On average, Americans consume 22 teaspoons of sugar a day, most of it is in the form of high-fructose corn syrup served in soft drinks and candy bars.
- Women are more likely than men to pull their Oreo cookies apart before eating them
- Popsicles were invented by accident by an 11-year old boy. In 1905, Frank Epperson accidentally left a cup of soda mix outside overnight with the stick he used to stir it with. In the morning, he found a frozen treat complete with handle.[3]
- The inventor of popsicles, Frank Epperson, originally called his creation “Epsicles,” which was a combination of his name and the word “icicles.” His children, however, convinced him to change the name to what they called him “pop” ;hence the name “popsicles.”
- Popsicles were originally marketed as “a frozen drink on a stick.”
- Cherry is the most popular popsicle flavor.
- Reese’s original name was “penny cups.”
- Every year, Reese’s makes enough Peanut Butter Cups to feed one cup to everybody in the U.S., Africa, Europe, Japan, Australia, India and China.
- Over 450 billion Oreo cookies have been sold worldwide since their debut in 1912. This is enough to reach to the moon and back 5 times
- Americans eat over 4.5 billion tacos per year. That’s enough to stretch 490,000 miles, which is to the moon and back.
- Hershey’s makes one million miles of Twizzlers every year.
- More than $2 billion of candy is sold for Halloween, more than any other holiday.
- The agent that gives Twinkies their smooth feel, cellulose gum, is also used in rocket fuel to give it a slightly gelatinous feel.
- Every day, over 200 million Skittle are made.
- If laid end-to-end, all the candy corn made in one year would circle the earth 5.7 times.
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