The worldly chicken: How fast food is merging our global culture

Image via Wikipedia

My Korean-made Samsung mobile phone rang — or, more accurately, it played a Brazilian pop song ringtone I’d recently downloaded from my neighbor’s Toshiba computer. The display told me the caller was a friend, a Croatian-Salvadoran colleague and, at the moment, my roommate.

“Yo,” he said. Even a Croatian-Salvadoran laid-off mortgage broker says Yo! in this interconnected era. “I’m at the KFC/Taco Bell drive-thru. You want somethin’ or not?”

Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell, merged into a single America fast food emporium. I was speechless. “So you’re saying two extremely distinctive cultures long at odds with one another have become one?”

“Man, do you want somethin’ or not?”

Anything, I said. Anything is fine. I was anxious to see what kind of fusion experience this combination would produce. It did not take long for my hunch to be proven accurate: The plastic bag was imprinted with the letters KFC, with the familiar illustration of a white Kentucky colonel wearing a Reconstruction-era string tie. But inside, foil packets of Mexican-style hot sauce and burritos wrapped in Taco Bell-branded paper rested alongside the familiar red-and-white chicken dinner box.

The revelation arrived with the first bite from the “Extreme Chicken Burrito.” It featured bits of chicken meat, lots of it. Was this Mexican chicken dish related to the Southern fried chicken dish, in terms of the global supply chain?

It took just a few moments to get the facts behind this intriguing culinary pastiche. According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia offered in many of the world’s languages, both KFC and Taco Bell share a single corporate parent. Imagine, the peasant cuisine of Old Mexico and the regional traditional dinner of the Confederacy, produced beneath the same roof — and from the same ingredients.