Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/26/kfc-goes-meatless-in-atlanta.html
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Urban legend no more. I personally know someone who was inches away from biting into KFM (mouse, not rat) before their sister noticed the tail. I imagine it’s happened to more than one person. The occasional rat or mouse falling into a vat full of batter among millions of pieces of chicken isn’t exactly implausible.
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Beyond meat!
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We tried the Gardein Chick’n Sliders recently and they were quite good. I’m a little surprised that chicken is coming after beef in the meat replacement game, as chicken is a very simple texture and is more or less a blank slate taste-wise. Chickens are little more than walking extra-firm tofu sacks (from a food point of view, obviously from a spiritual point of view they are majestic creatures of myth and legend.) Maybe chicken substitutes just get less press because it was an easier transition.
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Well, that’s true of industrial chicken.
Those raised humanely, on decent feed, tend to have tons of chickeny flavor.
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Soon: meatless rat substitute.
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I hope that the latest round of burning Amazon starts a wave of vegetarianism just to spite brazil cattle ranchers.
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Mmm, mmm, mmm. . . is it going to be just as unbearably salty as their chicken?
Ahhh, but this lends creedence to the “other” KFC urban legend. . .
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It’s a fact to me, and many of the people who post here probably know me well enough to put a little stock in that. But you are correct, there is no wikipedia entry on the time a mouse fell into the batter at a KFC and, approximately the same size as a piece of chicken, ended up in a bucket of chicken that a friend of mine was eating.
Feel free to be skeptical that some person on the internet is one degree removed from someone who nearly bit into a KFM. But in an 89 year old company that current has over 22,000 locations, which side of occam’s razor are you on if you don’t think a mouse or rat ever ended up in a bucket of chicken?
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Sometime during the summer of 1979 I last ate meat. I slowly tapered off so I don’t remember an exact date. But that makes it forty years, 2/3rds of my life.
I never missed meat. I guess I miss tge taste of Big Mac sauce, but that’s it. For a decade I couldn’t even stomach meat analogs, but with time I could. I eat veg burgers and tof u dogs on occasion for the experienve of something in a bun with toppings, not because I miss meat.
This new wave of meatless meat has no appeal to me. I dob’t want something to bleed, even if it is beet juice. So thrse things are for people who feel obligated to drop meat, but find it still appealing, as opposed to me never really liking meat. If people change for guilt reasons, they may not stay changed.
I wouldn’t trust fast food restaurants for keeping vegetarian food away from the meat. Maybe they havr isolated places for cooking meat analogs, but nobody talks about that.
I don’t really eat out much, but there are restaurants that don’t sell meat, and those are the places to go.
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I’m still waiting for a big vegan-cheese wave hitting the mainstream (or at least Europe).
Daiya is pretty close to what I expect from melted cheese, but after about 10 years on the market,
there should be more and improved alternatives.
Or Daiya should at least be available everywhere.
Besides from an ethical standpoint, dairy is much more problematic than meat.
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“you could grab a bucket of chicken without feeling quite so guilty”
the only guilt i would feel is from giving money to a fortune 500 company instead of supporting a locally owned independent business
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This has the potential for being good, i don’t know what KFC is planning on using for there’s a local Austin chain called Flyrite and they have a vegan fried chicken and it’s really tasty. It feels and tastes very convincing
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My problem with vegan cheese is that while it does melt, it gets creamy. It works, but on pizza the texture isn’t quite right. That said, the flavor is pretty much where it should be.
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I’ve been to the Fly Rite on Burnet Rd and I was underwhelmed. If I was going for something local(ish), Lucy’s is my pick. I’d probably still pick KFC over both though.
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I’ve heard multiple times that their chicken sucks, i’ve only had the vegan option and really enjoyed it. The biggest downside however is price, for what they’re charging (even if it were good) i can get something comparable or better elsewhere. And yeah Lucy’s and Tumble22 being near them makes going to Flyrite a hard sell.
If you check out Tumble22 try their chocolate toffee pecan pie, it’s great.
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Sometime during the summer of 1979 I last ate meat
The hundreds of insects you accidentally eat every year would like to issue a correction.
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I get hat you say, but as an actual meat eater, I never had a problem with meatless substitutes for meat-based products. Because while I I do like some salt and pepper on my meat and sometimes a bit of sauce, lots of burgers, marinated meats for barbecues, sausages and meat spreads are so obviously heavily processed that their vegetarian cousins are the better choice, in my eyes. Just found a bean paste that gives my beloved liver wurst a run for its money.
Found the same true for KFC. Any time I tried it I found it to be so overwhelmed in spices and salt that I probably couldn’t even tell if they slipped in a meat substitute.
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KFC is 75% about the fried breading, 25% about the chicken. Probably 90/10 for the extra crispy. You could put almost anything in there and it’ll be good.
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This. Even before turning into a mo-fr vegetarian, I gave up on weekly chicken years ago (even though our local conventional butcher already carried better stuff that what you’d get at a fast food place) in favor of fully, grown chicken which actually ran around. More expensive and thus a rarer treat, but the muscle is more developed and tastier than a flabby turbo chicken. It’s even more pronounced when you put away the leftovers and get them from the fridge and bring them back to room temperature.
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