“THE DIR

When Dr Sally Mackay, senior lecturer in population health at Auckland University, studied the composition of popular fast-food meals, the salt levels were what jumped out.

“It does add flavour, and I guess we’ve always known sodium intake is too high in New Zealand. And quite a lot comes from fast food,” Mackay says.

According to her as-yet unpublished study, one particular KFC burger exceeds the maximum daily sodium intake by itself, at 1137mg per serve. Nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of KFC combo meals provide more than the maximum daily recommended level of sodium (2000mg), 58 per cent provide more than half our recommended daily energy requirements, and 47 per cent provide more than the maximum daily sugar allowance.

KFC say: “We are proud of the menu items we sell, but as with most Quick Service Restaurant product offerings it is intended to be enjoyed in moderation.”

Among the reforms Mackay advocates are serving size suggestions, targets for chains to reformulate healthier meals, government benchmarks for sodium and energy, warning symbols, such as a salt shaker for high-salt products (as used in New York), and a ban on marketing fast food to kids, so “they don’t just think it is an everyday food”. She also wants proper nutritional information, arguing that KFC provides nutritional labelling for only about half its products.

KFC says nutritional information for “core menu items” is on its website, and for “promotional products” on request.

The glamour of grease

My friend Simon is a medical professional, so I haven’t used his real name, as it could be professionally embarrassing. He eats KFC about once a fortnight: “Despite the fact I should know better, now and then a good feed of KFC does scratch an itch.”

One in three adults and one in 10 children in New Zealand are considered obese, and you’re almost twice as likely to be overweight if you live in a poorer neighbourhood. We have the fourth-worst obesity rate among the OECD countries.

More than half (54 per cent) of Kiwi kids aged

2 to 14 eat fast food once a week; 7 per cent at least three times a week. A quarter (27 per cent) of our average household budget is spent on restaurants and takeaways. You can’t blame it on KFC, but we’ve had a societal shift: treat food has become a staple.

In part, argues Professor Louise Signal, head of the department of public health at Otago University, that’s because junk food (and obesity) has been normalised by the everyday environment our children live in.

A team led by Signal asked a group of Wellington 12-year-olds to wear body-mounted cameras for four days, and recorded their advertising exposure. They reported they saw junk food advertisements 27 times a day (more than twice as often as they saw ads for “core” food).

Signal says we should ban fast-food advertising and sports sponsorship (such as KFC’s support of Big Bash cricket and the White Ferns), as we did in 1995 with tobacco. “Our obesity rate is through the roof, and we need a circuit breaker,” says Signal. “Why do you like greasy, horrible chicken? It’s because it’s glamourised.”

KFC claim they don’t market directly to kids, and their sponsorship support for sport is to “help promote an active lifestyle, and be part of a fun, lively atmosphere”, and even that “we don’t try to pretend there’s any connection between our products and the diets or successes of the players – and we’re confident the fans understand this.”

Signal co-authored a paper called Prime Minister for the Day, asking kids what they would change about New Zealand – 60 per cent said they would ban junk food marketing. “They see the ads, it makes them hungry, and they buy it, even though they know they shouldn’t,” says Signal. “That’s what they told us.” My 11-year-old son tells me there are kids at his school who arrive early enough to buy chicken from the KFC across the road, known in student slang as the “Kids’ Fattening Centre”, and walk into class with it in their bags. Others have maximised the brief window between the final bell and the departure of their bus to nip across for a bucket.

“Why do we say it is OK for multinational junk food purveyors to target our kids with sophisticated marketing?” says Swinburn. “Why is that OK when we’ve got the second highest rate of childhood obesity in the OECD?”

The secret XI

Chicken itself, of course, is quite a healthy food: it’s a cheap, low-fat protein.

But frying it turns healthy into unhealthy.

Even when KFC’s reclusive executives do speak, they never, ever talk about the composition of the “11 secret herbs and spices” they base their entire marketing spiel upon. Russell Keast says food scientists, if bothered, could fairly easily deconstruct the recipe.

And the general guess seems to be some combination of salt, thyme, basil, oregano, celery salt, black pepper, dried mustard, paprika, garlic salt, ginger, and white pepper (ie lots of salt): Colonel Sanders himself once said the ingredients would be on any home chef’s shelves.

KFC chicken is then coated in a series of dry mixes of flour, dried egg and milk powder. That suggests recreating the magic shouldn’t be hard.

Rob, not his real name, is an experienced chef who has worked in various fine-dining restaurants, cooks karaage chicken and hot wings for his kids at home, and has something of a fascination with KFC.

“There’s just something about it that’s hard to put your finger on – there’s something comforting about it,” he says.

Rob says KFC isn’t doing anything as fancy as using buttermilk in their prep, and he rather admires their efficient use of dried ingredients, which allows for freshness and fast on-site preparation in bulk.

He considers it difficult to get chicken so “ridiculously” juicy as KFC chicken without prepumping it with a starch solution. Juicy chicken delivers a pleasing contrast with the crunch of the crust, and also provides enough moisture to make it very hard for it to be overcooked and left dry. He says that’s tough for the home chef to recreate.

The magic, Rob believes, comes from KFC’s imported Henny Penny pressure fryers, which enable the chicken to be cooked at a much lower temperature. If chicken meat gets too hot, he says, the meat gets “tight” and dry. Lower cooking temperature, then the

We’ve allowed it to happen: as a society we have decided that the commercial imperative trumps people’s health and wellbeing, we don’t regulate for it.