A Chicken in Every Plot

Cheap-chicken ad from KFC hides true cost of food; here’s a tastier, low-cost alternative 17

What’s he hiding?

Undeterred by the thorough trouncing he received last time he threw down the gauntlet, the Colonel has placed it gingerly at my feet once more, with another apocryphal advertisement that premiered during—what else?—the Super Bowl.

I know that times are tough, and every business has a right—perhaps even a duty—to make itself at least appear to be the frugal choice.  I get that; I really do.  Even my own restaurant has cut prices, introduced lower-cost fare, and offered bargains for repeat business.  We’re all in this together, and we all want our respective businesses to survive the turmoil.

The ad is not so bad for what it says, as much as for what it does not say (and understandably never would).  For those who cannot bear to watch, let me offer a synopsis: It’s morning in the parking lot of the scrupulously manicured KFC, and a 55-foot tractor-trailer awaits the opening cook’s arrival as the voice-over announces, “KFC’s original-recipe whole chicken is delivered fresh.”  The pavement is wet after a spring rain, and the place is lit up because the sun has yet to fully rise, all while a guitar gently picks a tame bluegrass rendition in the background.

Thanks to the magic of pause technology, one can actually read the fine print that KFC’s lawyers made them place at the bottom of the screen that otherwise lasts about four seconds. It says, “Fresh claim applicable to KFC’s drumsticks, thighs, wings, and breasts.  Not applicable in Alaska, Hawaii, and due to supply outages” (my emphasis).  The not-applicable-due-to-supply-outages part could just as easily read, “This is true, except when it’s not.”

But let us take the nice lady in the ad at her word, and assume that all the cut-up chicken on the Tyson truck outside is indeed fresh.  By “fresh” she is referring to chickens that were raised in CAFOs in tens-of-thousands, beaks removed so they can’t peck each other to death due to stress, then slaughtered in meat processing plants where 1 in 3 of the often-undocumented workers is injured to the point of hospitalization every year.  The waste from the CAFOs and processing plants are among the biggest contributors to climate change-related pollution.

Nice voice-over lady is revealed to be a worker in the restaurant.  She goes on to tell us that the chicken is prepared fresh for you every day in their 11 secret herbs and spices, and she knows this because she’s the cook (fine print on screen reads, “actor portrayal”) and there’s “one of us in every KFC.”  Here she may well have a point, since there is less and less actual cooking going on in chain restaurants around the world.  At KFC, though, cooking consists of operating a high-pressure fryer and a microwave.

The true root of my complaint comes after all this touchy-feely stuff, when the music gets more upbeat and a different voice launches into the pitch: the “Unbeatable Feast” of dinner for five for just $3 each.  Again to the fine print: “Limited time offer at participating KFC restaurants. Prices may vary. Tax extra. Extra charge for breast piece substitution.”  Now they pay exactly the same amount for each of the pieces they buy, and unlike wings, thighs, or legs, they get four breasts from every bird rather than two because they cut the breasts in half.  But that’s just me whining.  The insidious part is the message itself.

Offers like this, and the countless others that have been foisted upon us for decades, hide the true cost of cheap food.  In addition to the fact that it’s both fun and easy to prepare a more nutritious, better tasting meal at home for less, the impact of fast food on our health, environment, and culture has been gargantuan.  For example, the rise in the use of HFCS in food products marketed primarily to children and the rise in early-onset diabetes and childhood obesity are exact parallels.  Much of the heart disease in this country—the No. 1 killer—can be traced directly to these edible food-like substances.  These things are driving our medical costs through the roof. Throw in the effects on the environment of all the CAFOs, processing plants, packaging, shipping, and idling cars in drive-thru lanes, and it’s no wonder Al Gore got the Nobel.

These may be tough economic times, but that’s all the more reason why we should stop looking at price and start looking at cost. Here’s a recipe that can easily feed a family of five for under $14.99, and you won’t have to pay sales tax, either.  The sausage and the sour cream are both optional, but I wouldn’t do without them.  Obviously get all the ingredients you can from near to your home.

Photo: Robyn Lee

Chicken and Sausage in a Chili-Orange Glaze

1 whole chicken, cut up
1/4 cup olive oil
2 pounds red potatoes, cubed
1 15-ounce can of tomatoes, chopped (use fresh when in season!)
1 large yellow onion, diced
1 clove garlic, sliced very thin
1 pound spicy sausage such as chorizo or linguica or Italian, sliced
2 tablespoons chili paste (to your taste)
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 cup sherry
1 cup orange juice
Toasted cumin seeds, to garnish
Sour cream, to garnish

 

Heat the oil in a large frying pan over medium-high heat.  Add the chicken just a few at a time so the pan is not crowded, and brown on both sides.  Remove to a warm plate and repeat with remaining chicken.

Sauté the potatoes and onion in the same large pan over medium heat for 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the garlic.  Sauté until the potatoes are tender. Add the chicken and stir. Add the sausage, tomatoes, chili paste, cumin, orange juice, and sherry. Simmer covered for 15 minutes, or until chicken is tender, and serve immediately with sour cream and toasted cumin.

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  1. sje333 Posted 3:51 am
    05 Feb 2009

    ...am I missing the punchline on this one?...so instead of paying KFC to deep-fry CAFO-raised pre-breaded chicken body parts, we should buy raw CAFO-raised chicken carcasses, chop them up (exposing our families to EVEN MORE salmonella), and cook the body parts ourselves?  Is this Grist's idea of an April Fool's joke?  That holiday is still the first of April, right?
    This is why the right-wingers refer to this kind of mindset as "hippy crap."  We might as well say that it's okay to buy Lay's Potato Chips from your local grocer, but you're a bad person if you buy the same bag of Lay's Potato Chips from your local Wal-Mart Supercenter.  You can put organic ketchup on either one!
    Mr. Friese seems too intelligent to honestly believe the "often-undocumented" workers who slaughter the chickens he buys are magically NOT among the "1 in 3" who "is injured to the point of hospitalization every year."  How does the solution he suggests make an improvement?  Granted, there is no way to put a dollar value on the family time spent preparing a meal together.  Those are the moment that make you immortal through the memories of your children.
    ...but how about a healthy alternative?  Instead of replacing the breading and sauce, let's replace the whole system!  Let's not force the working poor to do our dirty work for us, dehumanizing, desensitizing, and hospitalizing them at the same time.  After all, if you're going to sell a chicken carcass, it MUST BY LAW go through a USDA-approved slaughterhouse.
    This was a really disturbing article.

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  2. redambrosia99 Posted 4:06 am
    05 Feb 2009

    local chickensIn the previous article related to KFC advertising, the author specified a locally raise, free-range, organic type chicken.  I would assume he meant the same here.  Even though they are more expensive, such chickens are still cheaper when you buy them whole and cut them up yourself.
    As for salmonella exposure, it is not a problem if you follow proper food safety rules.  I've been cutting up chickens for dinner since I was a teenager, and not once has anyone in my family every gotten sick from salmonella.  You use a clean cutting board and knife, wash your hands and tools when you're done, and its no problem.
    Also, that recipe sounds delicious.

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  3. mskellyann's avatar

    mskellyann Posted 4:31 am
    05 Feb 2009

    The problem is . . .Free-range, organic, locally-raised and -slaughtered chicken is available only to the few of us who a) raise our own chickens, or b) live rurally, near people who do.  Food is not a hands-on thing for most Americans.
    And that is what needs to change.  Any bright ideas?

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  4. sje333 Posted 5:04 am
    05 Feb 2009

    free range slaughter?If these free-range organic chickens are being slaughtered by a competent farmer and sold to families who can afford to drive out to the farm and pick them up, the salmonella (and campylobacter) risk is probably reduced.  In that case, the farmer and the buyer are violating federal law.  All chicken carcasses sold to the public MUST BY LAW go through a USDA-inspected facility.  I only know one person who eats the chickens he raises.
    In my always-humble opinion, food is something you should be able to eat.  You shouldn't have to wash it off your hands and knives after you cut it for fear of illness.
    I have a bright idea, Kellyann!  Teach people to grow the most expensive fruits in their own homes.  Strawberries do great on an apartment balcony.  It can be as easy as buying a bag of potting soil, lying it on its side, cutting it open, putting some seeds in, and watering them every few days.

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  5. sherrieh's avatar

    sherrieh Posted 5:50 am
    05 Feb 2009

    get that you're matching chicken for chickenand keeping cost steady, but I'd love to see a vegetarian or vegan meal in a meal to meal cost comparison with their deep-fried bucket of bits.  I'm pretty sure one could easily feed 5 for less than 15$.

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  6. CyberBrook's avatar

    CyberBrook Posted 2:35 am
    06 Feb 2009

    horror and horror-lite The lesser of two evils is still an evil.
    Raising chickens and pigs for food, ingredients in the recipe above, is still cruel to the animals, bad for our health, potentially dangerous to public health, and bad for the environment on which we depend.
    Ultimately, there's not a fundamental difference between KFC and this elitist version, akin to horror and horror-lite. Revise and resubmit.
    For a real alternative that includes better health, cost savings, compassion, and environmental sustainability (which I thought was the whole point of Grist), please visit Eco-Eating at http://www.brook.com/veg

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  7. friarslantern Posted 3:15 am
    06 Feb 2009

    I'm an omnivore.I don't know about you.  I evolved by depending on (small, but essential) quantities of meat.
    Go ahead and eat a bunch of soy and get sick later in life if you want.
    I'll stick to eating small quantities of meat, and supporting humane slaughter of the meat I eat, and a prayer over the life of the animal I eat, before I eat it.
    I'm not trying to make you do the same.

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  8. Cornrefiner Posted 7:08 am
    06 Feb 2009

    High fructose corn syrupHigh fructose corn syrup, sugar, and several fruit juices are all nutritionally the same.
    High fructose syrup has the same number of calories as sugar and is handled similarly by the body.
    The American Medical Association in June 2008 helped put to rest misunderstandings about this sweetener and obesity, stating that "high fructose corn syrup does not appear to contribute to obesity more than other caloric sweeteners."
    Even former critics of high fructose corn syrup dispel long-held myths and distance themselves from earlier speculation about the sweetener's link to obesity as the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition releases its 2008 Vol. 88 supplement's comprehensive scientific review.
    Many confuse pure "fructose" with "high fructose corn syrup," a sweetener that never contains fructose alone, but always in combination with a roughly equivalent amount of a second sugar (glucose). Recent studies that have examined pure fructose - often at abnormally high levels - have been inappropriately applied to high fructose corn syrup and have caused significant consumer confusion.
    Consumers can see the latest research and learn more about high fructose corn syrup at http://www.HFCSfacts.com and http://www.SweetSurprise.com.
    Audrae Erickson

    President

    Corn Refiners Association

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  9. Ceka Posted 10:37 am
    06 Feb 2009

    Veg versionFor those of you looking for a vegetarian version, I think this would actually be pretty easy to veganize. I'd throw in a can of chickpeas (good with the curry) in place of the chicken and sausage, then add some fresh ginger for extra flavor (good with curry, orange, and sherry).
    Of course, if you do that, it won't look much like KFC...but that's okay.

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  10. redambrosia99 Posted 2:54 am
    07 Feb 2009

    animalsAnimals are a part of a natural ecosystem (ya, stating the obvious, but it sets up for my next line which is:), so animals should be part of our managed ecosystems, i.e. farms.  Chickens are great on farms, you let them lose after the harvest and they eat bugs in the field, poop all over it, scratch around and mix their poop in with the soil, and generally do helpful things (eating bugs and their eggs = pesticide; poop = fertilizer).
    There are much worse things happening on our planet than some people eating meat.  Yes, our food system is a mess of nasty suffering and poop, but that can be changed.

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  11. bstrin5150 Posted 1:53 am
    08 Feb 2009

    usda slaughter houselast time i checked people were allowed to slaughter a small number, one thousand i think, birds per year with out USDA inspection.

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  12. Schrmin Posted 4:28 pm
    08 Feb 2009

    There're much worse things happening on our planetthan some people eating meat?  That's debatable (and even if there are it doesn't mean we should dismiss the issue).
    According to the U.N. FAO report titled Livestock's Long Shadow, "the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global," and "the livestock sector is...responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is a higher share than transport," (and this doesn't even touch on forest destruction, land degradation, manure, methane, water use, etc, nor on the seafood industry decimating the world's oceans).
    According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than a half-million cars off U.S. roads.
    Grist has touched on the meat topic before:
    http://www.grist.org/advice/ask/2007/09/17/

    http://www.grist.org/news/daily/2007/08/30/5/index.html
    Here are some other resources:

    http://www.earthsave.org

    http://www.themeatrix.com

    http://www.factoryfarmmap.org

    http://www.un.org/events/tenstories/06/story.asp?storyID= ...
    "nothing would benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." - Albert Einstein

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  13. redambrosia99 Posted 2:37 am
    09 Feb 2009

    eating meatI wasn't saying our industrial food complex was not a huge problem.  It is, it need definite improvement and people certainly need to eat less meat.  But the fact of people eating meat is not cause for hysteria, as some seem to think.  If eating meat was an unnatural horror there would not be lions and sharks and polar bears.  But in fact eating meat is part of a natural ecosystem.  Of course, humanities' activities have gotten so far off track from natural systems that the way we do things now is definitely a horror.  But when (being optimistic here) we get back on track, our managed ecosystems will have to incorporate animals in them, which we will have to slaughter and eat to control their population.

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  14. cavecanem Posted 3:14 am
    09 Feb 2009

    Audrae Erickson - High-fructose corn syrup contains mercury. Need I say more?

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  15. PermieWriter's avatar

    PermieWriter Posted 5:42 am
    09 Feb 2009

    Take a breathI really don't think that any of our vegan colleagues here can complain that they read this article thinking it would be a vegetarian recipe. It's strange that they would expose themselves to something that would be so upsetting to them, but I don't expect to understand everything about my fellow human beings. None of the vegetarians I know personally feel any need to evangelize about their diets.
    Anyone reading a meat-containing recipe on Grist and assuming it suggests that they buy anything but the most humane and sustainably sourced meat (for both human and animal) has some serious issues.
    BTW, if you simply can't do without fried chicken (brown mushrooms make an excellent buttermilk fried dish), try raising your own rabbits. It's very easy, generates high quality manure for potting and your garden and assures that you know exactly how your meat was raised and slaughtered. And rabbits are much easier to slaughter than chickens.

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  16. Lhogue Posted 3:59 am
    10 Feb 2009

    That was a great recipeTried it last night. My wife thought the blend of spices and other stuff for the sauce looked strange. Turned out great, kids loved it too. Though it was heavier on meat and fat than we usually like. Have to eat vegetarian for the rest of the week.

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  17. Lhogue Posted 4:10 am
    10 Feb 2009

    Dear Corn Refiners association:Please keep your mercury out of my body. And check out this sweet surprise video, (which I'm sure everyone here has already seen).

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