“THE DIRTY BIRD”

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According to her as-yet unpublished study, one particular KFC burger exceeds the maximum daily sodium intake by itself, at 1137mg per serve.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.

use of a warmer to hold the chicken before serving, “relaxes” the meat, while also keeping the crust crunchy. Standard deep-frying causes moisture to evaporate as steam, drying out the chicken, but pressure frying retains the moisture, in part because the chicken’s internal temperature rises faster, and in part because the steam enveloping the food acts as a temperature buffer. Result: faster and juicer.

Harland Sanders had worked all this out in 1934, even if he didn’t have the scientific explanation.

Sanders began frying chicken at his roadside cafe at a Shell gas station in North Corbin, Kentucky, in 1930. Shallow-frying in a skillet took an inefficient 35 minutes, but deep-frying, he felt, compromised the quality. So the former farm hand, deckhand, locomotive fireman and life insurance salesman modified the first commercially-available pressure cookers into pressure fryers.

When Sanders (the “Colonel” was an honorary title) first franchised his model in 1952, he toured small restaurants with a carful of those pressure cookers and bags of the “secret herbs and spices”, agreeing a franchise fee of 4 cents a chicken.

I don’t have a pressure fryer. So taking a crack at making a decent fried chicken at home, I soaked chunks of chicken breast in buttermilk for six hours, then combined flour with Rum and Que’s Dirty Bird seasoning (a mix of starch, salt, spices, garlic and unspecified herbs), and shallow fried at a high heat. The kids liked it anyway.

In the past 15 years, I can only remember eating KFC once, and I was drunk; it was after an evening football game and one of my team-mates arrived at the pub with 100 of chicken for the team. From memory,itwasama ing.Forthisstory,Ifeltit required a sober analysis.

Verdict: a mixed bag. The actual chicken was pretty good. Visually ugly, the skin wasn’t tight to the flesh and there was a stray hair on the drumstick. But the magic 11 were doing their thing, and while the salt was heavy, it definitely worked.

The chips ... were just chips with some seasoning. The potatoes and gravy were vile, possibly one of the worst things I’ve ever eaten. I couldn’t touch the coleslaw after that. The Zinger Stackerburgerlookedama inginthephotos.In the flesh, not so impressive. And the actual flesh was bland and chewy, with a nasty cut-through of spice. I reckon my homemade chicken was better, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I

In the food swamps

In 2019, KFC bought a building which housed a pharmacy and doctor’s surgery in Ōtara, South Auckland. It was in the heart of what Boyd Swinburn calls a “food swamp”, a suburb where the food choices are mostly unhealthy options.

Community groups rallied, organised a petition, and gained media attention, and KFC withdrew its plans. But that triumph disguised the reality: if KFC had wanted to forge ahead, there was little anybody could do to stop them. Whilst you can lodge an objection to a new pub or liquor store in your neighbourhood, you can’t contest the arrival of a fast-food outlet.

Some academics argue that it’s time to set limits on how many fast food takeaways are permitted in a suburb. “Policy-makers have a lot to answer for – why do we let oning happen like this where every second shop in a strip is junk food oralcohol ”saysSwinburn. “We’ve allowed it to happen: as a society, we have decided that the commercial imperative trumps people’s health and wellbeing, so we don’t regulate for it.”

Swinburn accuses chains like KFC of deliberately targeting poorer demographics. “This is not an accident,” he says. “This is deliberately planned and funded and marketed. Not an accident at all, and they are reaping the profits and our poorer communities and our Pacific communities are paying the price.”

The local ward councillor, feso Collins, agrees. “There is a very intentional strategy on the part of these multinationals to target poorer, more vulnerable areas, because they are aware of what happens when you are desperate.”

KFC, unsurprisingly, demur: “Like most corporate businesses, we invest in research that helps us determine whether to open a store. Traffic, visibility and easy access are all factors that we consider, along with other services and amenities in the area.”

There have been some stirrings around the issue: Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said the city had “too many chicken shops”, suggested borough councils ban takeaways opening within 400 metres of any school (he has also banned fast-food bus and tube advertising).

But Collins says there is a disconnect between central and local government .“What can I do” he asks. Unless a takeaway is unsanitary, council has no powers to close it down.

Collins describes post-lockdown excitement about KFC as “at the shallower end of our expression of freedom”.

“As someone who grew up in Ōtara and still lives in South Auckland, I am dismayed at how so many of our families have turned for a sense of freedom to KFC, or Dunkin’ Donuts, or McDonald’s.”

Swinburn, not surprisingly, says KFC and its fellow fast-food travellers were exploitative in the way they marketed that feeling of freedom to us around lockdown, with advertising that explicitly sided with us, and he claims tried to “further embed themselves within the New Zealand culture”. As the latest level 4 lockdown lifted in Auckland, KFC (which also gave away free chicken to the vaccinated) told its social media followers: “We’ve missed you,” and “Auckland: stop crying, we’re frying”.

As chair of Ōtara Health, Collins says he’s seen intermediate-age children already weighing more than 100kg, and set up for a “life of hardship”.

That’s why he chooses the word shallower, says Collins, because what’s really being reflected in his view is a society where people work multiple jobs, have few home routines and use fast food as a measure to ensure meals are on the table. “Out of desperation, places like KFC have become a key part of our community, not because they are an intrinsic part of who we are, but because we have become so dependent on them because of the desperate situations so many of our families face.”

When his own family takes healthy options when it’s their turn to cater lunch at church, some kids ask where the fried chicken is. “I think we’ve got this palate

now that if it’s not fried, it’s not tasty, and if it’s not tasty, we don’t want anything to do with it. People almost ridicule my daughters because they like eating some fruit, or a carrot stick with a bit of hummus.”

Collins says that when time-poor families are rushing past fast food outlets every day, they are hard to avoid. The chains market on practicality and price, but it’s a myth that fast food is cheaper than home cooking.

Sally Mackay ran a study in which her team bought a range of popular takeaways, then replicated them in a home setting. A home-cooked chicken dinner was “significantly cheaper” than its KFC equivalent, and remained cheaper even when the time cost of preparing it was factored in at minimum wage, a finding that even surprised her, “because it is so pervasive that people think takeaway meals are cheaper”.

The other freezer

ou might imagine there would be only one person with the bright idea off reeingKFCbefo relock down. Wrong. In Nelson, trainee teacher Lee Henaghan had the same brainwave.

As befits a former journalist, before he drove to the store, He na gh an researched the safety off reeingKFC. But on arrival, he limited himself to a simple three-pack – a moment of deference to his vegetarian wife and her anticipated reaction at seeing a giant bucket of chicken every time she opened the free er.

“During lockdown, I got quite into cooking, and got creative with the recipes I’d never made before,” Henaghan says. ‘‘ very day it was there, and I’d think ‘maybe I’ll have that for lunch’. But I kept it for as long as I could.”

About four weeks in, he buckled, and cooked his treat, live-tweeting the experience. “It dawned on me that I was probably the only person in New Zealand having KFC for dinner. It was pretty special.”

Accompanied by his own mashed potato and gravy, the chicken, he says, did not disappoint. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder I’ve had some good KFCs, but that was up there with the best.”

The rule of pent-up demand says that if we were already chicken fans before, then lockdown would only enhance desire. And retail marketing lecturer Dr Megan Phillips says KFC enhanced that by advertisements that underline the sensory pleasure of their chicken, but also, less obviously, by advertising that specifically evokes a “shared food experience” (families eating together or workmates heading out for a bucket) to create shared memories and emotional ties.

Henaghan certainly suspects his love of KFC is founded on a mental association with treats and good times dating back to having it on special occasions as a child; it was cemented when as a kitchen-averse student at the University of Nottingham there was a branch on the ground floor of his apartment block.

Henaghan moved to New Zealand in 2009. He’s noticed some differences – the UK version of the Zinger burger is much spicier, KFC here is far cheaper, but, in particular, its social standing: “In the UK, it’s just another takeaway. Here, it’s almost part of the cultural fabric.”

Still, he now treats the “dirty bird” as an occasional, and usually solo experience, given his children, aged 9 and , are also vegetarian and he describes himself now as a “flexitarian”. “It’s definitely a daddy treat,” he says. “The kids are a bit disgusted by it.”