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By Manny Fernandez
Ours is a nation that has given the world baseball, the airplane and the electric light, but also Kool-Aid (Edwin Perkins, 1927), Pizza Hut (the Carney brothers, 1958) and Doritos (Arch West, 1966).
The history of junk food is a largely American tale: It has been around for hundreds of years, in many parts of the world, but no one has done a better job inventing so many varieties of it, branding it, mass-producing it, making people rich off it and, of course, eating it.
The death of an obscure New York entrepreneur on July 27 — Morrie Yohai, 90, a World War II veteran who was the man responsible for Cheez Doodles — was a reminder that the world of junk food is no different from celebrated American industries. The pioneers behind the automobile and the personal computer are household names, and their ingenuity and a-ha moments have become part of the folklore of American entrepreneurship. But the back story of junk food and fast food has its own moments of genius, serendipity and clever adaptations.
“I look at it as an incredible phenomenon that’s changed America, for better and worse,” said Andrew F. Smith, the author of the Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food.
Soft drinks, ready-to-eat hamburgers, salty snacks, ice cream and candy all fall under his definitions of junk and fast food — products that have little or no nutritional value or are high in calories and fat, or both. Putting health questions aside, here, then, are a few great moments in junk-food history:
1896
Two street vendor brothers — Frederick and Louis Rueckheim — sold a popcorn, molasses and peanuts confection at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. By 1896, they had perfected their recipe and called it Cracker Jack, and would soon repackage it for freshness and start advertising around the country. “They created a product that is commercially available nationally and salable,” said Mr. Smith, who considers Cracker Jack America’s first junk food.
1905
Tootsie Rolls, manufactured in New York City starting in 1905, changed junk food with one simple touch, and it had nothing to do with the chewy chocolate taste. It was the first penny candy to be individually wrapped.
1923
One unusually frigid night in San Francisco in 1905, 11-year-old Frank W. Epperson accidentally left a powdered-soda drink he had made for himself on the porch with the stirring stick still in the cup. The next morning, he awoke to find a frozen concoction, on a stick.
Tootsie Roll Industries
He tasted it. He showed it to his friends at school. And then he went on with his life, eventually going into real estate. It was not until 1923 that Mr. Epperson finally applied for a patent for his discovery. These days, Unilever sells two billion of them in the United States each year. Mr. Epperson initially called his product Epsicles. His children had another name: Pop’s ’sicles.
1928
Walter E. Diemer was a young man working as an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia. In his spare time, he began experimenting with recipes to produce a gum base that could be blown into bubbles. Months went by. When at last he had a good batch — stretchier than most gums at the time, and less sticky — he sent 100 pieces to a candy shop. The gum sold out in one afternoon.
Fleer started selling Mr. Diemer’s gum, calling it Dubble Bubble. Not everyone who invents a junk food that becomes a global sensation becomes a billionaire. Mr. Diemer received no royalties, and eventually retired from Fleer as a senior vice president in 1970.
At the retirement village in Lancaster, Pa., where he lived with his wife, he was known for presiding over bubble-blowing contests for children. “He was terrifically proud of it,” his wife, Florence Freeman Kohler Diemer, told The New York Times after Mr. Diemer’s death in 1998 at the age of 93. “He would say to me: ‘I’ve done something with my life. I’ve made kids happy around the world.’ ”
1930
James A. Dewar was the manager of a baking plant in Chicago during the Great Depression. He noticed that the shortcake pans that were used during the strawberry season sat idle the rest of the year. So he baked little cakes in the pans and injected them with a banana cream filling. He dubbed them Twinkies (a name inspired by a billboard he passed advertising Twinkle Toe shoes) and sold them two for a nickel.
The events that have defined America have had a way of influencing its junk food, too. When bananas were rationed during World War II, the banana cream center was replaced with vanilla cream. Today, Hostess bakes 500 million Twinkies a year.
At the age of 83, Mr. Dewar boasted that he ate at least three Twinkies a day. “I fed them to my four kids, and they feed them to my 15 grandchildren,” he said in an interview a few years before his death in 1985. “My boy Jimmy played football for the Cleveland Browns. My other son, Bobby, was a quarterback for the University of Rochester. Twinkies never hurt them.”
1976
7-Eleven convenience stores helped launch the era of fast-food and junk-food supersizing that continues today by introducing the 32-ounce Big Gulp. But even the Big Gulp seemed small after a while. In 1988, the company started selling the 64-ounce Double Gulp.
In junk food, as in Silicon Valley, creativity is limitless. In 1998, the Big Gulp cup was refined and redesigned. The new cup was taller, and now it fit in most car cup holders. Progress, of some sort, had been made.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section
WK
, Page
3
of the New York edition
with the headline:
Let Us Now Praise the Great Men of Junk Food. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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