Abstract
Junk food is an anomaly when it comes to historical traditions of cuisine. It emerges in the context of youth culture in America in the model part of the twentieth century but soon morphs into a type of food eaten by people of any age. This transformation of its meaning is part of a symptomatology inherent in consumerist cultures, whereby objects of any kind (including food) are produced quickly, cheaply, and faddishly, reflecting a discontinuity with historical traditions. The semiotic analysis of fast food corroborates Barthes’s critique of consumerism as a culture of commodification and it also points out the power of socioeconomic forces to transform historical meaning structures.
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