Proudly distancing ourselves from the origins of our food
On April 14, Kentucky Fried Chicken will prove to the American people just how much it loves us by unleashing its boneless chicken. Now, in my opinion, food should resemble something that can be found in nature, so we’re not exactly talking about food, here. It’s more mood, as in, we’re not in the mood for skeletons.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a vegetarian, but not a militant one. I don’t believe that vegetarianism will cure all that ails this planet. I avoid meat for my own reasons and let the omnivores do what they will. ?But on the eve of KFC’s boneless drumstick debut, I have to ask, “What more does the goddamn chicken have to do to please you lazy gluttons?”? Chickens live miserable lives…they die, en masse, in miserable conditions, but we look the other way because they’re tasty. ?These birds give and give and give – they inspire not only our relentless philosophical conundrums (the chicken or the egg?) but even our wedding dances. ?And doesn’t “playing chicken” serve as an archetype for game theory?
Yet that’s not enough. Now we need them to be boneless.? Not since that narcissistic little bastard in Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree” have I seen such self-absorbed, entitled behavior by humans towards nature.? One day, the chickens will rise up with fists…or beaks…against their oppressors, and it will not be pretty. There will be blood.
Actually, what bothers me most about this bit of “evolution” has nothing to do with the melancholy life and Dachau-like death of the chicken itself. Let’s face it, chickens wouldn’t know melancholy if Sam Cooke himself came back from the dead and serenaded them with “A Change is Gonna Come.” What’s troublesome is that this is yet another assault on our food sense. KFC claims it’s saving us time and making our lives easier, but that’s an excuse for feeding us, technically, rubber chickens!
According to Walter Perez, one satisfied KFC-feeder featured in a USA Today video, “It was easier to eat because it was boneless. It didn’t take as much time.” Watching Walter, I thought, Now here’s a guy with a jam-packed agenda. He doesn’t even have time for a meat product engineered to fall from its bones to begin with! Then I became distracted by pencil-brow’d Virginia Massie’s case for convenience as her two-year-old forages in the background, likely believing there are no bones in food.
What in the name of Michael Pollan is going on here? It’s bad enough that this mood-food is infected with Cartel kilos of sodium, fatty acids, and hormones. Now KFC, McDonald’s, Jack-in-the-Box, and others are hell bent on getting these artery busters into our bodies even quicker. Less chewing is our undoing, people!
If our fast food overlords were truly interested in saving us time, wouldn’t they serve us healthier foods? Sure, a salubrious diet might take twenty, maybe thirty minutes longer to cook and eat than these processed nuggets of death, but aren’t we then rewarded with five or ten years tacked on to the end of our lives? So by going the boneless route, are they really saving us time? Of course not. Profits are better when you can hook ‘em while they’re moving too fast and feeling too fit to care.
It’s important to remember that corporations and the politicians they purchase rarely have our best interests in mind. Call me paranoid, but every dystopian government I’ve ever read about or seen in movies has used food to manipulate the masses. I don’t need to tell you what Soylent Green is. And not a single meal in Huxley’s Brave New World was complete without soma (“all of the benefits of Christianity and alcohol, without their defects.” Huxley’s words, not mine).
So on April 14, when KFC tries to serenade you with their version of “I gave my love a chicken; it had no bone,” resist. Say no to wing shaped-meat paste masquerading as a real drumstick. As for me? I’ll be at my neighborhood KFC, pulling a Belushi. Not the speedball – I mean the guitar.
I’m no vegetarian, but our first guest blogger and composer of this entry, Christopher Lewis, certainly is. Thank you, Mr Lewis.
I don’t have to chew as much.
