Let Us Now Praise the Great Men of Junk Food

(NYTimes) 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. Continued