Undoubtedly, we have a public health problem in our health care system, which is still not very visible at the moment. It is not a disease per se, although this phenomenon is the cause of many major diseases and often even deaths. I am talking about obesity and in particular childhood obesity. According to the World Health Organization, 2.8 million people die each year from obesity.

One of the causes of this hidden or disguised pandemic is the bad food, the bad eating habits and junk food that we take on almost daily, without even knowing that we are doing it or because we cannot afford something healthier economically or because we are not able to resist the countless temptations that fall on all sides, or because we simply do it knowingly, thinking that the dire consequences do not go with us.

By junk food we mean everything that is eaten with little nutritional value and with a high amount of calories, saturated fats, salt and sugars, as well as additives. French fries, sugary drinks, hot dogs, wurstels, hamburgers, industrial pizza, preprocessed food; in general, we are talking about the food provided in the “fast-food” or in the thousands of different franchises that invade the most sought-after areas of our cities to tempt people with their greasy, cheap and lethal offers.

Its consumption is related to obesity, diabetes, heart or brain attacks, hypertension and other health problems. There is a biological explanation for why we like to eat it. When we eat especially tasty food such as junk food, the reward circuit in our brain turns on. This releases dopamine. The chemical rush floods the brain with pleasure and, in response, the brain creates more receptors for dopamine. In the same way that people with drug or alcohol addiction require a higher dose over time, you crave more junk food the more you eat it.

Especially (but not only) on weekends, streets and playgrounds are the scene of this deadly spiral. In these places you can see the vast majority of children swallowing kilos of sweets that they receive “as a reward” after a day of school or simply “to be left alone”, with the approval of parents who only theoretically pretend to care about the welfare of their children.  Seeing that spectacle, I feel disgusted, and my mind predicts and visualizes these children at the age of 30, and sincerely it hurts me deeply, the superficiality with which the present is managed, without having a minimum of future projection because parents simply want to enjoy the “freedom” (irresponsibility) to let everyone do whatever they want.

When in restaurants I see that what drink both adults and children are drinks with sugar and gas or supposedly fruit juices with additives, my insides twist and I get angry at the widespread thought that “nothing ever happens”, to live in the present and if something happens, they will give me something to cure me.

When I see the endless queues in the junk food stores and the atmosphere that is breathed in those dens, disguised as places where real life happens, I realize that the people who are there, actually do not care what they are eating because for them the important thing is “the experience”; it could very well be something synthetic, the important thing is that it has the taste that their brains expect to find in a place like that. The marketing “algorithms” and the platforms behind junk food try to transform eating into impulsive consumption, removing any kind of relationship between the act and the need. It is the transformation of the act of eating into a sequence of acts not always related to eating but focused on encouraging impulsivity and always with… happy selfie.

Thanks mainly to the messages launched by the very powerful global mass food companies and their commercial policies, which care nothing about the health of their peers, junk food has already reached a privileged status in our society; for many people, eating junk food reinforces the state of belonging to a “cool” community; for others it is the only way to make ends meet (garbage is sold cheaply to avoid creating barriers to access and no government dares to tax it with heavy tariffs); for many others, it is the fastest way to solve situations in which the desire to cook is lacking because there is always something more important to do and “this way I make the children happy while I’m at it”.

Junk Food Gourmet has been conceived with this “background sea” and its purpose is to denounce the harassment to which we are subjected by food multinationals that encourage us to take their products as the solution to our needs (not only food). I do it in an ironic, indirect way, presenting junk food as the main course of a haute cuisine menu served in luxurious restaurants or aristocratic houses. I wanted to align the status that junk food has in our society with the concept of haute cuisine that used to be associated with specially prepared dishes, elegantly presented and to be savored with space and attention to detail in taste, sight and smell. It is the degradation of haute cuisine and the exaltation of junk food that find a balance in the visual representation of my images.

The gourmet aspect that I wanted to give to my series, also wants to draw attention to another problem associated with junk food: childhood obesity is always more a matter of social class; this dramatic added problem is demonstrated in the Aladdin 2023 report. In families with an annual income of less than 18,000 Euro, 23.6% of children are obese, while in families with an income of more than 30,000 Euro per year, this percentage drops to 10.9. The same study says that Spanish children receive at least 4,000 junk food advertising impacts per year (11 every day) and children whose families have low incomes see twice as many junk food advertisements as those with more purchasing power.

Perhaps by this I mean that, if access to this type of food were made difficult, through prices, but also by raising awareness and breaking the current spiral that associates eating junk food with “being cool”, free, modern, daring, carefree, perhaps we would manage to improve the health of citizens and reduce public health costs. It would be necessary to try, for a minimum of ethics and a simple equation between costs and global benefits. This would also encourage research into new healthy foods and into producing more and better foods, taking into account the limitations of the soil at our disposal, the climatic changes we are undergoing and increasing environmental sustainability.

But for the moment, all this seems utopian and therefore we have to sit at these gourmet junk food tables. Buon Appetito!