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KFC, Genetic Engineering, and Myth

© Jesse Buerk

It's interesting how information that is completely false can spread virally throughout a culture and be accepted as true by otherwise critically thinking people. I'm sure you've heard this one sometime in the past couple of years via some e-mail forwarded to you by one of your liberal-minded friends. It's been around for over a year at least. I'm talking about the rumor that Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC for Frankensteinian reasons. The story was that KFC had engineered some sort of beakless, featherless, feetless organism that was being fed by tubes, which pumped the creatures full of nutrients and kept them alive until they were ready to harvest. KFC supposedly saved gobs of money by raising the mutant chickens, but the government forced them to remove any mention of the word chicken from their menus. Thus the switch from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC.

I have to admit that I fell for this one. In fact, it didn't even surprise me, though the thought of all the times I had consumed Kentucky Fried Critter turned my stomach. It's actually quite frightening that something like the mass production of a genetic mutant for fast-food consumption is not an unthinkable possibility. However, when you step back and think about it, the KFC tale reveals itself as nothing more than an elaborate urban myth. Think about it. KFC is a restaurant franchise that falls under the umbrella of an even larger chain of restaurants, including Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. These restaurants are not in the agriculture business. KFC would have to raise close to a billion chickens per year to supply enough breaded, secretly seasoned, and deep-fried meat for its armada of stores. And that doesn't even factor in the needs of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Sorry folks, but KFC gets its meat from suppliers of regular old dead chickens. Some genetic manipulation may take place, for example, engineering chickens with more breast meat. After all, companies don't have to tell us if a food is genetically altered in the US. But any such tinkering is incredibly minor compared to a featherless, beakless, feetless freak of nature.

This led me to wonder about the origins of this myth. It seems a little too intricate and specific to have simply been the spontaneous creation of a society and culture fearful of genetically engineered food products. Part of the rumor even consisted of a study by the University of New Hampshire that never even took place, according to Snopes.com. My gut feeling is that the KFC myth is the work of one or many Culture Jammers.

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