How a Foodie Got Duped and Seduced By Mass-Market Produced Fast Food
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I’ll be honest. I love the taste of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s really tasty—I ain’t gonna front, as the kids say (do the kids still say that? Crap, when did I turn 32?) But, probably like many of you, I haven’t eaten there in many years. I just don’t trust them to source their chickens responsibly, sustainably, or humanely. I’ve seen Food, Inc. Those poultry factory farms will break your heart.
Self-described foodie Deirdre Heekin had to wrestle with her own conscience recently when a friend pulled the old “it’s a family recipe psych I got it at KFC” gag on her. She writes about the difficulty of trying to source fast-food chicken (or anything else, for that matter) in this article for AlterNet:
On a snowy, yet moon-driven New Year’s Eve, we drove south along two streams to our friends’ house for a late buffet supper and holiday celebration. The house was warm with a fire roaring in the grate, guests mingling casually between several rooms, and glass after glass of champagne to ring in the new decade. A few of the guests had gotten together to provide the dinner for all of us. There was a cave-aged Gruyere fondue, pate, deviled eggs and baked ham. There was a green salad, beets. There was fried chicken. There were fluffer-nutters, little elegant tea sandwiches with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff. This was a down-home buffet, a cozy and rather self-satisfied scene.
All the dishes were delicious, but it was the fried chicken that had everyone buzzing. “This is the best fried chicken I’ve ever had!” could be heard through the halls and bouncing off the corners of rooms. And it was true. It was the best fried chicken any of us had ever had. Spicy with plenty of black pepper and salt, maybe a dash of white pepper, it was juicy and crisp at the same time without being heavy. I grew up in a part of the country where fried chicken is served as part of the local cuisine. This was better than the chicken at the Hornet’s Nest, or Horsketters Tavern, or the Darmstadt Inn. It had umami, that elusive element that somehow makes flavor three-dimensional.
Our culinary hostess smiled, a bit wickedly and deliciously I might add. “It’s an old Kentucky recipe,” she said. Earnest questions and exclamations followed. “Are you from Kentucky?” ”Is your grandmother from Kentucky?” “This is delicious!” “You outdid yourself!” “Where did you learn to do this?”
“Oh, it’s just a little old thing I picked up,” she said. “It’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, Original Recipe.”
Sometimes it’s worth doing something for the shock value, to wake people up, to get them to think and respond. This revelation had a good-natured shock value among all the guests. While some were truly dumbfounded, others, myself included, laughed, and said, “I can’t wait to get my next bucket!”
But this clever party trick has caused some personal angst and questioning. I’m a restaurateur with a fierce devotion to local provisioning. We even grow a goodly amount of our own produce. I’m a sommelier of sorts with a fairly proficient nose and palate. How could I be duped, and then seduced by mass-market produced fast food? It’s enough to lose sleep over. Could it be that KFC is a fast-food anomaly and sources responsible, even sustainably? Could the food revolution really be infiltrating our fast-food nation?
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