KFC Me: Something to Cluck About?

Before last week, I couldn’t have told you the last time I’d eaten anything from KFC. It had been quite awhile to be sure, maybe even decades. However, what I could have remembered viscerally despite these many years was the distinctive flavour of the Colonel’s original recipe chicken. I could have also thought back vividly to how much I loved eating that fried chicken as a kid. Growing up in a small town in in the American Deep South, Kentucky Fried Chicken seemed to have achieved the impossible by creating a menu that managed to serve fast food convenience plus a spread of family favourite dishes perfectly suitable for an at-home feast to be enjoyed around the Sunday dinner table.

These days as an expat living in London, I tend not to patronise corporate fast food outlets – or at least not any places that I consider to fall into such a category. Truth be told, any given week can find me regularly interacting (whether completely aware or totally oblivious) with all sorts of multinational whatevers dotted about the urban landscape and retail shelves of my daily life. For example, as much as I like to trumpet the benefits of shopping at my locally owned indie grocery, I can’t say I completely shy away from picking up budget buys at my nearby Tesco. I reckon that – like a lot of other Londoners – as health conscious and civic-minded as I aim to be with diet and shopping at the end of the day convenience, cost and (lack of) awareness play major roles in how I live my life as a consumer.

So when an invitation recently came my way for a “behind the scenes” visit to KFC HQ in suburban London, I must admit my own secret recipe of childhood memories and cravings blended with cynical adult ambivalence and amounted to a heaping dish of intrigue and a quick RSVP to take up KFC on the offer. Soon enough I was on the train to Woking to visit the UK offices of Yum International (the corporate group that owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell) for a talk and a tour and even the chance to have a go at frying up some chicken in an actual shop.

Join me as I cluck about my findings in a short series of posts. Part Two coming soon!