The Mysterious, Stubborn Appeal of Mass-Produced Fried Chicken

There’s just no other sort of food that demands so much dedication just to produce something as good as what a fast food chain is turning out around the clock.

A year ago, a good friend of ours confided that she and her husband hardly eat out anymore, but when they do, it's Popeye's. And that they eat a lot more Popeye's than they should. This article is a fascinating look at why that is.

This passage is amazing:

Biting into a good piece of fried chicken is a pan-sensory experience that checks off just about every box of non-sexual physical pleasure. You pick it up with your hands, shatter the crust with your incisors, and rip the succulent flesh from the bone. Steam wafts any seasonings noseward as the hot fat coats your lips and courses over your tongue. If it’s prepared right, that first bite is a high you chase for the rest of the meal and onward until your next bucket.

Fried chicken often carries an emotional weight that few other foods can contend with. Perhaps more than anything that doesn’t literally come in a heart-shaped box, it’s a food product associated with love—the unconditionally, evenly-burning sort that doesn't so much as flicker just because you've got some schmaltz on your chin or a few hot sauce stains on your shirt. It's less a food than a personal history tied to our deepest sensory memories: Church picnics, block parties, pot lucks, grandparents' kitchens. How can you mass produce something that contends with such an intimate, atomized experience?

We served fried chicken at our wedding reception. We were really young and poor, but I don’t remember anyone being put off by it. But there was something satisfying about eating something so greasy in such nice clothes.

“Every culture embraces poultry,” says Tracy Gates, chef and owner of the Busy Bee in Atlanta, where she has been cooking soul food since 1987. “There is no culture where you don’t see chickens. It’s a universal bird. Everybody puts their own spin on it, but it’s readily available for every culture. I think chicken will be here when everything else is gone.”

I love all the hundreds of ways that you can cook a chicken, but I had never really thought of it as a universal food. Maybe chicken can bring the world together.