Kentucky Fried Coronary
Apr. 21st, 2010 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matthewdalyI've said it before, but if Wonderella and I agree that you are off the rails, then dude, you are seriously off the rails. However, people seem to eagerly argue that the KFC Double Down "sandwich" is the greatest abomination in fast food history.
Please.
Even if you handicapped them by putting a bun around it, it's a double chicken sandwich with cheese and bacon. That doesn't even survive the first round of the Fast Food Abomination playoffs. When I was living in California, Jack in the Box would routinely offer specials like double cheeseburgers with three slices of cheese, five strips of bacon, and ranch dressing. But this? Burger King has spent years with "buy one chicken sandwich, get one free" coupons, and you have to know that customers were routinely eating both of them in the same meal. Take a deep breath.
My only question is why people are going into a KFC and ordering processed products like this when their signature fried chicken is so outstanding and you can just SEE that it's made out of a whole chicken with breading and fried in oil and nothing mysterious except exactly what the specific herbs and spices are.
On a slightly broader and less silly note, Nate Silver at 538 does an interesting deconstruction of the issue (which is a great relief from that site's normal operation these days of relaying Obama's talking points without even pretending that it's about poll analysis or statistics any more), and I think he is onto a good point when he talks about the utility of understanding nutritional benefits and harm per calorie. I think that there are two tough parts about meal planning with an eye towards maintaining weight. The first is making sure that you're taking in the proper amount of calories considering what you burn off through your basil metabolism and exercise, and the second is making sure that you don't accidentally shoot your entire wad of sodium or polyunsaturated fats on a single small portion of it. And the data that we get doesn't always do the best job of driving that home. I don't think that Silver has the magic bullet right off the bat, but it's an interesting avenue for exploration.
Please.
Even if you handicapped them by putting a bun around it, it's a double chicken sandwich with cheese and bacon. That doesn't even survive the first round of the Fast Food Abomination playoffs. When I was living in California, Jack in the Box would routinely offer specials like double cheeseburgers with three slices of cheese, five strips of bacon, and ranch dressing. But this? Burger King has spent years with "buy one chicken sandwich, get one free" coupons, and you have to know that customers were routinely eating both of them in the same meal. Take a deep breath.
My only question is why people are going into a KFC and ordering processed products like this when their signature fried chicken is so outstanding and you can just SEE that it's made out of a whole chicken with breading and fried in oil and nothing mysterious except exactly what the specific herbs and spices are.
On a slightly broader and less silly note, Nate Silver at 538 does an interesting deconstruction of the issue (which is a great relief from that site's normal operation these days of relaying Obama's talking points without even pretending that it's about poll analysis or statistics any more), and I think he is onto a good point when he talks about the utility of understanding nutritional benefits and harm per calorie. I think that there are two tough parts about meal planning with an eye towards maintaining weight. The first is making sure that you're taking in the proper amount of calories considering what you burn off through your basil metabolism and exercise, and the second is making sure that you don't accidentally shoot your entire wad of sodium or polyunsaturated fats on a single small portion of it. And the data that we get doesn't always do the best job of driving that home. I don't think that Silver has the magic bullet right off the bat, but it's an interesting avenue for exploration.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 11:42 pm (UTC)I'm not sure if this was serious or sarcastic. :) (I'm honestly not sure, I mean.) But I'm going to treat it as serious.
One thing is that a lot of people don't like to eat chicken off the bone. When I used to eat meat, I would never eat chicken off the bone. Once my family went on a road trip and my sister got very hardcore on the, "KFC is the only common chain restaurant that serves certified halal meat," so my family had a LOT of KFC that trip. I got the big crunch sandwich every time. It's really tasty, and has no bones or sinew or fat or any of that other stuff that's not chicken-meat. When my Dad used to make chicken curry, I used to spoon the sauce over some rice and just eat that because I so disliked chicken off the bone.
I guess it's not that surprising that I eventually became vegetarian (and in Canada, KFC has a pretty tasty vegetarian sandwich, which has led to me eating KFC for the first time in millenia -- even before I was vegetarian I had given up on it because the smell of the place made me nauseated, but its distribution in mall food courts and such mitigates that a lot). However, a lot of my carnivorous friends who I've talked to have the same deal -- they really do not like eating chicken off the bone. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts, great, but off the bone, no.
(For the time during which I ate meat and was living on my own, the only meat I ever bought was: extra lean ground beef; boneless skinless chicken breasts; very occasionally luncheon meat slices; and prepared foods made with one of those (i.e. lasagna or things like that). So I was at least consistent in wanting my meats to have as little fat as humanly possible and as little resemblance to their origins as humanly possible.)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-22 01:07 am (UTC)I respect vegetarianism, but it's not for me. And moreover, I kind of want to take ownership of my omnivorism -- some level of respect for the fact that what I'm eating used to be alive and now isn't because of my dominion and appetite. And to me meat has a grain and had blood running through it and is attached to bones. It's an abstraction when you throw it all into a blender and form a patty out of it. It also leads me to a lot of purity and safety questions, since I don't know if they decided to throw some filler into the blender at the same time, and I'm quite sure that it didn't come from a single chicken. These are things that don't cross my mind when I eat meat off a bone. Boneless skinless chicken breasts are also fine with me because I can sense the complexity of the product when I'm slicing or eating it that just doesn't exist in deli-sliced chicken loaf.
I don't want to wear a badge saying that I'm in the Real Food movement, because I think that's a pretty mean-spirited name and I don't know their second level of beliefs. But I am skeptical of refined foods because I fear that they do manage to naively strip out a lot of things that we need and replace them with substances that the human body hasn't evolved to process in the quantities that we ingest them. Sometimes that means that I wind up accidentally chewing on sinew, but c'est la vie and chacun a son gout.