Mark Morford: One sandwich to kill you all

[yathrib]

One sandwich to kill you all

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, April 9, 2010

There are many horrible jobs in this life. Emergency room janitor. Sow inseminator. Earwax collector. Sarah Palin's grammar checker. Glenn Beck's fluffer. Republican. New Jersey.

But when I sit back, sip my scotch and scan the newswires for sundry effluvia indicative of our culture's joyful hellbound deathspin, the realization soon dawns that I can think of few gigs more nightmare-inducingly, soul-deadeningly horrible than being an executive for garbage food megacorp.

That is to say, a VP for McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King or their ilk, someone who sits around all day trying to discover new ways to manipulate, coerce, poison, and otherwise flagrantly kill millions of humans worldwide by convincing them to eat mass-produced, industrial feedlot, chemical-blasted garbage you should not feed to your dog unless you totally hate him and want him to get heart disease and die.

Hell, even the oil titans right now raping Canada can claim to be supplying a commodity that runs the engines of the world. Even Wall Street ogres can claim to be partaking of a time-honored tradition of gutting the U.S. Treasury at the expense of the ignorant masses. But head of marketing for, say, Kentucky Fried Chicken? Oh, you poor soul. Hell hath a special room for you.

Who are you, really, Mr. KFC executive? Who are you who just gave your approval to a rather shocking new KFC food item, who said "Oh holy hell, yes! Look at these great test-marketing numbers! F-- it, let's go against every shred of human decency, common sense, and even the First Lady's humble plea to get us to please quit making the country so stupidly obese and sick, and sell a truly disgusting creation."

Do you know what I'm talking about yet? Have you seen it? Apparently, for many months, people who run the snarky junk food blogs on the Interwebs heard rumors that KFC was testing this item, and thought it might be a joke, a viral gimmick. Or if not that, then something that certainly would never make it to market, given how it looks like some sort of frat-boy prank, like the drones at KFC's test kitchens got completely hammered one night and had a bet as to who could come up with the most repulsive menu item imaginable.

Behold, the KFC Double Down sandwich. It is, if you really want to know, two slabs of fried chicken intersliced with two pieces of bacon, two slabs of cheese, and the Colonel's "special sauce." It comes in the form of a sandwich, with the fried chicken where the bread used to be. It's sort of hilarious. It's sort of perfect. And then it'll probably make you vomit.

Did you notice? How in one pseudo-food item, you are consuming not one, not two, but the mutated, chemically injected flesh/byproducts of fully three different distended, liquefied, industrially tortured creatures? Feel the love, pitiable animal kingdom.

You got your chicken-like creature, your pig-like creature, your dairy cow-like creature, all wrapped in a $5 fistful of nausea, ready to strangle your heart and benumb your brain. God knows what's in the "special sauce." Maybe some sort of fish byproduct, just to round it all out. It's like a wild kingdom in your mouth! It's like a toxic zoo in your colon! It's like a suicide note from what's left of your brain! "If you eat this, you are a complete and total idiot, and we're through. Signed, You."

Let us now add a shred of wary perspective. For well do I know this horrible crapbucket of chyme joins a very long list of fast-food nightmares you should never put anywhere near your mouth, unless you deeply hate yourself and don't give a damn anymore, and you want to die fat and stupid and smelling like that rotting thing you found in your rain gutter.

What's more, some fast food companies are trying, at least a little, to respond to the call for slightly healthier foods, adding salads and fruit and grilled chicken breasts to their menus, even though every single one of those items is just as jammed with chemicals, preservatives, synthetic flavorings and high-fructose corn syrup as the rest, and all the "healthy" meat products are still raised on the most execrable, environmentally rapacious industrial feedlots imaginable. But hey, it's something, right?

Further, some argue that it's a bit disingenuous to blame the junk food purveyors for all the obesity, cancer, impotence, bad skin and colonic pain in the land. After all, the undereducated masses love to eat this garbage, right? KFC test-marketed this Double Down death bomb for months, to (presumably) great effect.

Of course, it's sort of a foregone conclusion, a rigged game. This vile meatwich is crammed like a grenade with sodium, sugar, fat and chemicals. Ergo, the testers, presumably people with taste buds devastated by years of cramming similar compost into their guts, thought it was pure nirvana. And then their colons exploded.

Had KFC actually tested it on people who eat real food every day, folk who haven't touched fast food in years, whose systems are strong and fully recovered and in whose bodies blood flows unobstructed, had KFC dared any genuinely healthy human to take a bite, you can bet they would have heard, and smelled, a slightly different reaction.

Maybe it's all a silly, futile argument, a fool's game to point up the obvious evil of such products. These items are legion. They just keep right on coming. What's more, it's just capitalism at work. It's about giving the people what they want, right?

And if they don't really want it -- if, deep down, most humans sense this garbage is hugely unhealthy, that it's a form of slow poison and there are far better and wiser options out there -- well, you do what companies like KFC, Coca-Cola, Kraft, McDonald's and all the rest have done since the dawn of the free market.

You convince the less educated and the gullible that they are wrong, that this crap is actually a good value for your family, nutritious and safe to feed to children, even as you manufacture all the flavors, smells and meat-like textures in a giant lab and sell truckloads of the crap to the poorer classes, until they get fat and sick and die. Meanwhile, you employ cute cartoon characters and bright, funny mascots to lure in the next generation, to keep the cycle going.

Do I have that about right, Mr. KFC exec? Did I miss anything? Can you hear me down there, what with all the flames and the screaming?

The Daring Spectacle

Mark Morford's new book, 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism,' is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.

Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.

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[barracuda]

The KFC "Double-Down" is simply a variation on a fine piece of traditional cuisine, the renowned "Chicken Cordon Bleu," which is, yes, chicken rolled around or stuffed with ham slices and swiss cheese, then fried, and usually served with a thick sauce of wine and cream. Cordon bleu is probably terrible for you, yes, even with the freshest, finest ingredients. Does it taste bad? Decidedly not. Is the "Double-Down" fine French cuisine? No. Would I eat one? Why, yes, I think I will, thank you. Is that disgusting? Probably, yes. But let's not pretend that the KFC marketing department invented roulades. People have been stuffing meat with meat and cheese for centuries, and liking it very much.

[The Consul]

My god....that picture is like...well, if you were on acid and someone slid it under your nose you would probably run outside and stand in the middle of the tracks to wait for the train.

[Nordic]

But .... it qualifies as Atkins!

[yathrib]

It does look sort of like the Great Cthulhu of sandwiches.

Point taken wrt Chicken Cordon Bleu. That sort of thing was considered haute cuisine30-40-50 yrs. ago. I don't think so much now... Most foodies I know, even the ones for whom health and nutrition is secondary, tertiary, or even quaterniary (?), would consider that sort of thing gross. Just saying. But the first meal I prepared for my home ec class* assignment included Chicken Kiev. Chicken Kiev, you may know, is breaded, boned chicken breast wrapped around a *butter ball* and deep fried. I'm sure there was more to it than that, but those are the basics I remember. And yes, it was really, really good.

*To be fair, home ec classes--in spite of the sexism inherent in limiting them to/requiring them for girls only, at least hipped students to the basics of preparing a tasty and nutritious (by the standards of the time) meal. This knowledge seems to be lacking in a large segment of the U.S. population today. Just like the loss of Civics led to a population that thinks the First Amendment is the Communist Manifesto and doesn't know it's not okay to vote for idiots and lunatics to Make a Statement.

[norton ash]

That's dreadful. I will stick to calves' liver scalded in milk.

[Canadian_watcher]

that effing thing is EVERYWHERE today.
by the way, ironically when the ad for it came on tv last night, there was a split second flash of the word "UNTHINKABLE" before the ad, then at the end of the ad it said "UNTHINK"

total creepiness.

[Perelandra]

Point taken wrt Chicken Cordon Bleu. That sort of thing was considered haute cuisine30-40-50 yrs. ago. I don't think so much now... Most foodies I know, even the ones for whom health and nutrition is secondary, tertiary, or even quaterniary (?), would consider that sort of thing gross. Just saying. But the first meal I prepared for my home ec class* assignment included Chicken Kiev. Chicken Kiev, you may know, is breaded, boned chicken breast wrapped around a *butter ball* and deep fried. I'm sure there was more to it than that, but those are the basics I remember. And yes, it was really, really good.

It appears that Cordon Bleu is an American invention that leapfrogged off of Kiev. While I consider it a bit over the top, I wouldn't call it gross if prepared with quality ingredients. Of course, we know that the long list of "ingredients" in each component of the KFC "sandwich" and how it's cooked are what make it unhealthy, and disgusting, and not food.

[IanEye]

by the way, ironically when the ad for it came on tv last night, there was a split second flash of the word "UNTHINKABLE" before the ad, then at the end of the ad it said "UNTHINK"

total creepiness.

[Canadian_watcher]

love the tagline on that one.. "Right and Wrong no longer exist"

[barracuda]

[The Consul]

This kinda ties in with the Overton Window thread. Oppressive mind control run amuk, destroying the human commuity.

[Laodicean]

The fucking thing looks like Pac-Man. Coming to eat ya...

In case you were wondering - the four actors names in this commercial are Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde.

[nathan28]

To use polite language, I would eat the fuck out of one of these right now, if a $5 money order marked "KFC" fell into my hands. Yes, this is trash cuisine. The only way to improve this would be to substitute avocado for the cheese, coat the exterior in olive tapenade, and throw some hot peppers into the fry oil to impart background heat to the dish, and suddenly, the barrier between trash and haute seems porous. I guarantee that if you chopped on up and put it on a salad, or even wrapped it in a lettuce leaf, or even just served it with a side of beans, no one would have said anything. But so what? How is a half-pound burger--the same quantity of meat--served in chain fast food places and greasy spoons everywhere in the US for, I dare say, decades, any less "disgusting" from this?

It needs to go on a plate, though.

Barracuda's analysis holds, and IanEye won Best Post of the Month and is already in the running for Best Post of the Year.

[Laodicean]

You got your chicken-like creature, your pig-like creature, your dairy cow-like creature, all wrapped in a $5 fistful of nausea, ready to strangle your heart and benumb your brain. God knows what's in the "special sauce." Maybe some sort of fish byproduct, just to round it all out. It's like a wild kingdom in your mouth! It's like a toxic zoo in your colon! It's like a suicide note from what's left of your brain! "If you eat this, you are a complete and total idiot, and we're through. Signed, You."

Buy one, get one free.