Memories of Grease & a Disgusting Invention

We all make mistakes. And sometimes it takes a long time for us to learn from those mistakes. Sometimes we can blame it on being too young. Sometimes we can blame it on being under the influence of something (probably when we were too young). Most of the time - especially when we are older - we regret these mistakes. I choose to look at them as learning experiences - learn a little, move on, try not to repeat.

I've made quite a few mistakes in my life, and will probably make quite a few more. One of the biggest ones to date was marrying way too young to a man who was wrong for me on way too many levels. As my older brother pleaded with me ("He's a small town boy, you're not a small town girl," along with "You're way too young!"), I went ahead and did it anyway. Looking back, I can't figure out what I was thinking - or if I was thinking at all. Why all the red flags hitting me in the face were ignored. Why I chose to ignore the difference in intelligence, the difference in ambition, the difference in culture....why oh why?

So, I have to admit when I saw the latest concoction that KFC came out with, it reminded me of my former husband. How when everyone else was going to college he was working there. How every night he would be doused in chicken grease, wearing it like cologne on his clothes and in his hair. How he brought buckets full of the nasty stuff home to his roommates (and to the bar where he traded it for beer...yet another red flag). And how his only ambition was to be the assistant manager of the place - in a college town where everyone else was only eating it because it was free and they were up late studying for exams.

I admit I liked the coleslaw. But I think it was about that time that I grossed out on meat altogether and decided to become a vegetarian once and for all. So, I have to say that the latest invention by KFC has to be one of the most disgusting things they have come up with yet. As reported on the Huffington Post:

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.

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.

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.

So, as I said, most intelligent people learn from their mistakes. In the case of this food, let's move on to healthier things. Really. I moved on from the former husband covered in this greasy stuff - many years ago. The spots on the shirts were disgusting enough....do we really want to put this into our bodies?

In a similar fashion, neither should have happened in the first place. But, learn I have. And as a writer, its all book material as far as I'm concerned. It reminds me of an old joke I read years ago: "A ham and egg breakfast is a day's work for the chicken, but a lifetime commitment for the pig." Just goes to show you, its all in perspective. And, yes, I made a commitment too, but at least I finally had the sense to walk away. I would suggest the same for this disgusting, can't-possibly-be-good-for-you mess as well.