to think its the hight of rudeness to call my homemade lemon drizzle cake junk food

[Pollydont]

For my birthday I made a cake to bring into work, a fresh lemon drizzle cake (contains 4 lemons) and no addatives or nastys.

Anyway one guy at work said his body is a temple and he doesn't eat junk food.

I wanted to slap him, homemade stuff isn't the same as junk food!

anyone else find it depressing that so many people define a cake made from flour/sugar/butter/eggs/lemons (all foods our grandmothers and great grandfathers would have recognised as foods) as junk food along with turkey twizzlers/canned cheese/factory created chicken/frozen treated french fries?

Lemon cake is something made in Uk since lemons were imported based on a cake recipe that was made for special occasions for centuries before that. It was eaten by people in moderation (for example for a birthday just like OP did) as a treat. Calling it junk food exemplifies to me the skewed attitudes to food now prevailing that may contribute just as much to obesity as the rest of the food crap going on. If a small piece of homemade cake is rejected for a birthday treat, not because the person doesn't feel like it, but because the person thinks their body is a "temple" and it is "junk" then no wonder food attitudes are crazy.

It is food. if it is cake, it is meant for a treat so don't eat it for dinner. but not being suitable for dinner doesn't make it junk food.

And your body isn't actually a temple.

meant his body isn't actually a temple. Mind you no one's is.

I class cake as junk food too, home made or otherwise but I wouldn't have been rude and said what he did to you I'd have eaten it

How ridiculous and very rude; a cake is not junk food if it is made with fresh ingredients. It is the amount you eat that is important. No bad food simply bad diet.

I talked about thus with DP last night, and it turned out that we had two very different definitions of "junk food", which also seems to be the case on this thread. His take on it was that the cake was unhealthy but not junk food. He would class a Mr Kipling cake as junk food, a home-made cake as unhealthy but not junk and a cake bought from a decent bakery as possibly either, depending on the ingredients used.

I, on the other hand, would count junk food as everything in that thin "unnecessary, eat in moderation" wedge of the balanced diet pie, regardless of origin.

Thinking about it in more depth, I am probably being a bit inconsistent, as I wouldn't class honey as junk. And, thinking about it in a bit more depth, I come from a culture where cake was not a wholesome home made treat, but something that you would buy in for celebrations and special treats.

I do consider cake to be junk food, but would it have killed him just to say "no thanks".

Thank goodness I have polite office mates, I brought in homemade chocolate brownie and apologised to someone I thought was vegetarian but turned out to be vegan that it wasn't suitable and said I'd try to find some vegan cake recipes. He politely explained that actually he doesn't eat sugar either so please don't go to any effort on his behalf but the brownie smelt lovely and he appreciated the offer. No 'my body is a temple' nonsense!!
Everyone else here is amazingly grateful for cake which is fine by me as I love baking but really shouldn't eat all the results!

Oh and I'm in the camp that home made food can be a treat and to be eaten in moderation - but isn't junk. For me junk is over processed and full of flavourings, colourings, preservatives etc. if it contains real whole eggs, fruit, butter, milk etc it's not junk, if these are replaced by hydrogenated fats, whey power, lemon flavour etc then it's junk.
Homemade treats to be eaten in moderation (if only I had the willpower) junk to be avoided as far as possible.

I certainly wouldn't regard home-made cake as "junk" food - the thread seems to be split half-and-half on this. Surely the term was coined to refer to mass-produced, heavily processed food full of additives.

I don't even agree that a home-made cake is necessarily unhealthy. Eggs are healthy, lemon is healthy, flour is (despite what some people on the thread are saying!) reasonably healthy. The sugar is the only obviously unhealthy element.

Anyway, the OP's work colleague sounds like a very nasty and rude man.

Absolutely nothing junky about home-made lemon drizzle cake at all. Packed full of good stuff. I wouldn't regard it as a 'treat', just as something lovely for everyone to tuck into.

His body a temple indeed!

What a twat a no thanks would have done. I bet he does gym selfies

Well, it's a treat in my book, not something that's particularly healthy or necessary to anyone's diet, but obviously he's a rude fucker for saying it's junk food and you'd have been well within your rights to say so.

hackmum as far as your body is concerned, refined white flour is physiologically the same as white sugar. It is one easy step for the body to convert the simple starch to a sugar, and from then on it is treated exactly the same by the body as sugar.

Refined white flour contains no vitamins or minerals. And it is probably bleached to look white instead of yellow.

When you eat a slice of white bread for example, you could be eating white sugar as far as your body is concerned.

This isn't based on my opinion. It's a scientific biochemical fact.

So counting the flour and sugar together the cake is approx 50% (by weight) "sugars". Can any food that is 50% sugar be considered healthy?

ShakeYourTailFeathers here here!

OP I'll have your lemon drizzle cake! Send some round this way please!

Staggeringly rude.

And what would have happened if he'd had one small slice. Precisely nothing. Except he would have been pleasant and not an arse.

What a rude, pretentious thing to say! He could simply have said 'looks nice but not for me thanks, I'm on a diet' but he had to sound better than everyone else and up himself You did a nice thing by bringing cake into work and he was rude to refer to it as junk, even he considers it junk. I would personally consider junk to be over-processed food crammed with artificial additives, not something home-made with mostly natural ingredients.

I think in the highly unlikely event that I ever refused a piece of cake I would have said 'no thanks I don't eat sweet stuff' or 'no thanks I'm trying to eat healthily / am on a diet'. I think it is a bit rude to refer to it as junk food.

Oh yes and can I have some please? It sounds delicious!

He sounds like an insufferable bore.

It's also tedious to hear people bang on about what 'junk' a slice of homemade cake is. Begone you joy sucking dullards.

A slice of cake in an otherwise healthy day is not worthy of mention unless the mention is 'oh my, what a delicious slice of cake that was'.