At the start of the film, there is no guilt in Gilligan’s pleasure walking into a chicken shop (“Bring on the wings!”). Growing up in a low-income household in London, a bucket of KFC was a family treat. He’s even done voiceover work for a Nando’s advert; “It’s just chickens, right?”. What works so well in the film is that Gilligan’s shock as he digs deeper into the industry doesn’t look manufactured for the camera. The UK rears one billion chickens a year and, in Lincolnshire, Gilligan meets animal welfare activists in balaclavas (“This is like Call of Duty. I’m scared!”). He learns about the environmental harm to rivers that chicken farming causes, and explores racist ideas around black people and fried chicken.
Fair enough. No one will learn these things unless they’re told them, obviously.
Gilligan speaks to a psychologist who explains how ultra-processed foods hook us, making us feel great – and then comes the crash. You can see the difference in Gilligan, who is lethargic and grumpy. It might not kill him, but his chicken diet is doing harm.
The obvious objection to all this is that of course you’re not meant to eat fried chicken every day. But, as he finds out, half the calories in people’s diets in the UK come from ultra-processed foods
Ultra-processed? Fried chicken? Whut?
This is fried chicken is bad, u-p is bad, therefore f c is u-p, right? Which is bad logic let alone bad observation or classification.
Ha !
I have lived my entire life on Angel Delight and I am still the lithe and lissom 21stones I was 20 years ago.
I get a bit breathless going upstairs, so I don’t anymore.
Which is slightly inconvenient because that is where the loo is….
You don’t have a sink in the kitchen;)
Try strawberry Angel Delight. For the fibre.
I get a bit breathless going upstairs, so I don’t anymore.
The answer to that is a bit like folding space: knock out the supporting walls and behold the beauty of a khazi slurping in your general direction.
Some days it’s watermelon
Tim’s put his finger on the kind of non-sequitur that very much gives the game away. Plainly this is a U non U game for the journo/ producers.
“Our sough dough avocado and chia seeds lunch is a U lunch and your fried chicken is disgustingly non U. But despair not my dusky friend we’re an evangelising religion and we welcome those who have seen the light. You see Mr non U, you can join our U team by foregoing this, this and this…..and this…..and this. Also its v important you tell everyone how disgustingly non U you used to be”
The point of U and non-U being that, once the non-U have taken up the U idea it is discarded by the U’s. So the game plays on.
Maybe becoming “lethargic and grumpy” is the result of having to talk to animal welfare activists.
This is just ‘Supersize me’ for this generation*. I wonder if they’ll dig into the lifestyle of this ‘Gilligan’ bloke and find something unpleasant which could materially affect the result of this little experiment – as they did with the alcoholic Morgan Spurlock.
*Just looked at the link and notice they point out the same.
Modern life doesn’t quite work like that. I understand Jean Claude Junkie is up to 2 bottles of brandy before breakfast and on his EU pension it’s vintage Napoleon…
There’s a story about Tommy Cooper having breakfast at a hotel.
He asks for a large gin and tonic.
“Can’t really Mr Cooper, outside hours.”
“Oh go on, I am here a lot. The manager won’t mind.”
So the waiter brings him a gin and a bottle of tonic, whereupon Tommy pours the gin on his cornflakes. He says to the shocked waiter:
“There’s a lot of cholesterol in milk !”
I understand the “plants scream when picked” meme is being worked on by Cambridge professors for 2031…
explores racist ideas around black people and fried chicken
…says an article by a black person eating fried chicken. I take it they couldn’t get any of the white Oxbridge staffers to do this? Of course not; they’re all vegan.
If you have the time and inclination, stand outside a fried chicken shop for a while in any area not 98% white, and be impressed by the revealed preferences. Same goes for Micky D’s around my way.
It’s a particular type too. Mate of mine used to live in Camberwell. On Camberwell Church Street, between the end of his road and the junction with Denmark Hill there must be a dozen fast food joints, including Turkish, Jamaican, Chinese and KFC. The only one with perspex surrounding the counter was KFC.
At first I thought this might have been Andrew Gilligan.
Now that may have revealed something.
What made Chicken the most successful bird species in the world? It’s tasty and so are its eggs.
One of those Lincolnshire chicken factories is in the next village. They have a factory shop and sell excess stock including packaged chicken like kievs from Waitrose and Emma Ness. Cheap. Tasty.
rhoda, it’s off to the gulag with you, it’s chicken Kyiv in Waitrose these days.
Did it on purpose. And here’s a Kharkov for you.
How I Lvov such banter.
What made Chicken the most successful bird species in the world?
Dinosaurs?
I’m 77 years old and for most of those years I thought fried chicken was just fried chicken. Was I just blind to racist fried chicken or did fried chicken become racist during the last 10 years or so? Is it always racist or is it just racist if a black person is mentioned in the same sentence? Or if a black person is in the room when fried chicken is mentioned?
I happen to like fried chicken. In the immortal words of Ali G, is it ‘cos I’s black?
So “Ultra Processed” now just means “cooked”?
What does the Skipper think about Gilligan’s logic?
I see what you did there. Well played indeed.
A lot of psychology is just the priesthood for socialism. These smart people agree with us about this, and have done the science.
The trouble is that about half of all published studies can’t be replicated.
And the UPF thing is clearly stupid. It’s bad if you buy from KFC but if you roll chicken in flour, breadcrumbs and spices, it’s ok. How does anyone say that without people not calling them a retard?
“He’s even done voiceover work for a Nando’s advert”
I can’t help thinking he’s not getting another.
“Morgan Spurlock (who pulled a similar trick 20 years ago, eating nothing but McDonald’s for one month in his 2004 documentary Super Size Me).”
And shitloads of beer.
I can’t help thinking he’s not getting another.
Lol.
Some things are so obvious they don’t even escape a Grauniad hack.
As noted by Hallowed Be, calling fried chicken a UPF gives the game away. UPF is just a euphemism for ‘prole food’.
In fact it stands for “Ugh! Prole Food”
Whilst I have some admiration for someone prepared to eat fried chicken at every meal for a month,I would be much more interested to see someone try to lose weight by only eating from McDonalds. I reckon it could be done and that you could eat quite healthily too, at least in the UK, where the selection is pretty wide. Not here in Hong Kong, where there’s a limited selection and no salad.
Somebody must have tried pedalling from Land’s End to Inverness eating only at McD. They might not have lost weight though, I’ve seen some pretty fit but fat cyclists.
I know plenty of very fit blokes who don’t look particularly fit but can walk all day up and down mountains in all weathers carrying a lot of weight.
Conversely, there are plenty of racing snakes who would struggle to get off the sofa to look for the remote.
Falklands experience: the slim racing snakes were struggling after a day or two of hauling their own bodyweight from San Carlos to Stanley, because while they were lean and fit, they didn’t have any reserves to draw on.
The rugby types – lots of muscle with a touch of beer gut – were coping better and slimming down at the same time (though still miserable, it was utterly Not Fun to be trekking through sodden peat bogs in winter)
The slim racing snakes were adapted to run races – in some cases two or three 400m sprints in a day. After a few days *with insufficient nutrition* they would start burning up protein as fuel.
There are two versions of what was the problem: were they too thin or did the army not provide enough food? I am inclined to say the latter because even the rugby players would have had trouble after two or three weeks on an inadequate diet.
60.6 years ago I went back to college early in order to do the vac work I had completely neglected at home over Christmas and do some training: I lost a stone in a fortnight but thereafter my weight stabilised *because there was enough food*
IIRC someone did that when Supersize Me came out, the key was not having the supersize option and having different items from the menu each meal to keep the daily calorie count below 2.5k
There was certainly a US academic who ate junk food and lost weight to prove it ain’t nothing but calorific intake that piles on pounds – https://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html
There was certainly a US academic who ate junk food and lost weight to prove it ain’t nothing but calorific intake that piles on pounds – can’t post a link but search ‘Twinkie Diet’
My primary objection to KFC is that they are very proud that it comes in a bucket.
So they can fuck off.
Is that for the almost inevitable aftermath?
Can’t comment, as I don’t know since I don’t eat the stuff.
Pigs eat out of….
… racist ideas around black people and fried chicken.
I thought the black people + fried chicken trope was American. Is it a British one as well? Or has Britain imported it from the States?
Also British. Watch the customer type at any fried chicken shop in a Diverse area.
I used to get my cameras fixed at a place in Vauxhall. Walking down Kennington Lane from the station one passes a handful of fried chicken shops. They are always brimming with black schoolkids. Non-black? Maybe 1 in 20 customers.
Tbf, I had chicken wings a day back at Constantinople aerodrome. Over the previous fortnight I’d had a bellyful of kebabs, and of yoghurt and similar meze-type pap*.
I wanted crunch, and cholesterol rich with dead animals.
*I like yoghurt, but your common or garden Turk has turned it into gravy. I feel this may be a grave mistake.
So, not much out of step with the demographics… 🙂
Britain imports ever more habits from the States – except the good ones.
I thought fried chicken was a pretty common Jamaican stereotype. They’re more British than most people out of Africa.
…in Lincolnshire, Gilligan meets animal welfare activists in balaclavas
Must be a different sort of animal welfare as I don’t think I’ve ever seen RSPCA or Donkey Sanctuary employees in balaclavas.
Donkey Sanctuary employees in balaclavas.
That’s the Provisional Wing
Do fried chicken enthusiasts have two sets of Provos, one on each side?
and explores racist ideas around black people and fried chicken.
If white people didn’t exist, he’d be happily scrounging the jungle in his loincloth for tasty grubs.
Ooga booga reality be racist innit.
Unless coated with my beloved’s tarragon sauce, chicken is pretty foul food. (Not sorry at all.) Why would you eat chook rather than duck or goose or lamb or beef or bacon except that it’s cheap? (Not sorry there either.)
We taxpayers should fund a huge cull of deer and gift the resulting venison to the benefits class. Do ’em a power of good.
No. Fuckem. Give it to me.
chicken is pretty foul food.
+ a lot
When I was posted to teach electronics at the Zimbabwe School of Signals straight after independence all they served us for lunch and dinner was boiled chicken. I wasn’t keen on chicken before then but positively detest the stuff now.
We taxpayers should fund a huge cull of deer and gift the resulting venison to the benefits class
My son is a pescatarian but he will eat the venison produced from the culls on the estate where he works on the basis that it wasn’t farmed for eating. We get some as well and its very nice.
Zimbabwe School of Signals? There’s a rich vein of potential humour there…
Zimbabwe had quite a professional army at independence.
Zimbabwe School of Deprivation Signalling?
When training drivers on the new rolling stock back in 2002 at Siemens in Wildenrath, two complaints came up – the only English TV show was Benny Hill (actually not English language but a programme we could understand), and the only meat on the menu was steak. Lovely, but steak for lunch and dinner every day for 5 days was a bit of a problem for some people….
Had Musik Laden finished by then? That was always a must watch in the early 80s and not for the music.
When I were a lad chicken was the luxury roast dinner, as opposed to “Not beef again!”.
We only had it at Christmas.
It’s one of those things I point out showing how society has moved. When I wrorralad, corned beef was cheap prole food, and chicken was a treat. Now, chicken is cheaper than corned beef. Especially those cylindrical chickens they’re so good at breeding.
It’s like anything else. A good slow-grown chicken from a reputable butcher, when roasted is a marvellous thing. A £4 supermarket chicken, not so much.
I’d like to revert to goose at Christmas but have been voted down. I shouldn’t complain, it is a bugger to cook.
There are some recipes for roast goose that aren’t all that difficult if your oven is big enough (certainly easier than some of my wife’s bright ideas for Christmas Dinner); however, like you, I have been voted down so it’s years since I cooked one.
Indeed. If your oven isn’t wide enough then you might have to spend Christmas morning hacking the damn things legs off so it all fits.
Chef Adam Byatt had a great bit on his YT channel about dealing with a goose, He recommends jointing it and confiting the legs, wings and neck etc in the rendered fat. Take the breasts off and pan/roast them til pink. Obviously the butchery, rendering and confiting needs to be done well in advance, not on Christmas morning when you’re half-cut on champagne.
Oops. This is one time where I did not read on enough.
Anyway, I did Byatt’s confit last Christmas. It was spectacular.
One day…. I think we are scheduled for a capon this year. Flavoursome and easy for the more befuddled chef.
I don’t drink Champagne if I am offered a choice [Blanquette de Limoux if I want or am asked to supply a sparkling wine, Gemurztraminer if I want wine with pork (my wife isn’t keen on pork so that is rare); she will occasionally drink a *good* Prosecco] so I am *never* half-cut on champagne. Wine with Christmas Dinner, liqueurs after but *never* while I’m cooking (OK, maybe one glass of decent sherry to relieve the stress).
Most recipes are pretty easy to follow.
Unless it’s Christmas Day and you’re utterly newted.
The first time I had to cook goose was on Christmas day when my wife was ill. But I found a Keith Floyd recipe for which the cook being rat-arsingly drunk seemed to be part of the instructions.
The more tricky one was a few Christmases later, during a power-cut (electric oven; we’re a long way from the nearest gas main). But it’s amazing what six rolls of tin foil and a wood-burning stove can accomplish.
Get your butcher to, er, butcher it for you. They’re* generally too big for a conventional oven otherwise.
Trust me, confit goose is a thing for the ages. Adam Byatt, on YT, has some corking stuff on this.
*the geese, not the butchers.
As others have said, goose is pretty easy if your oven is big enough to fit the damned thing in.
The problem with goose is that two thirds of it melts into fat, giving you the dual problem of a gallon of fat sloshing around the bottom of your oven and a distinct lack of meat.
Both of these problems can be solved, but only by starting with a sufficiently large goose and having a sufficiently large oven pan to catch all the fat. But that only increases the required size of your equipment.
You can scrape a lot of fat straight out of the body cavity and render it separately.
‘Tis a fact that a goose cooks for two days….
Same with turkey… it’s the idiocy of stuffing the thing in an oven and expecting it to come out nice in one pass…
The actual surviving medieval recepies dealing with goose are *far* different, quite tasty, and can be accomplished over a wood fire if you have a kettle large enough….
It *does* take two days to get it Ready to Serve..
But well worth it… And most of it is having it be around while you do Other Things, so not all that bad as it sounds…
Same goes for peacock, swan, and any other Huge Bird….
They already figured out how to serve it to bloody Kings and Queens in the medieval era, and of course we still “just stick it in the oven” , or make TikToks of flash-frying explosions with *frozen* turkey….
Or…. you learn how to cook and Respect the Knowledge of those who figured it out well before you….
( and yes… I prepared and served all of the mentioned, and then some… Over a campfire..)
Thomas Keller’s roast chicken is revelatory.
For that matter, the way most people ‘roast’ chicken is obnoxious. It’s like they want to kill it a second time.
Just push 15-20 studs of rock salt at various points into the skin of the prone beast, carefully place her onto a rack above a tray and let a kindly oven at 220-then-after-15-mins-180 take care of business.
75 mins tops.
Let ‘er rest. For at least 30 minutes. Don’t cover. Remove the rock salt.
Serve with all sorts of goodies. But starting with a wine-based de-glaze of the tray, followed by good stock, and all of the liquid well-reduced.
Or you could dowse your neck in a bucket of KFC and gloopy coleslaw.
This was a public service announcement on behalf of diversity, sponsored by Al-Beebra.
Fuck me, how hard was that?
Pretty hard when you’re utterly fucking bone idle and/or clueless.
Gloopy slaw it is then for you, sunny jim.
Add bacon?
(Cook it first)
you forgot to stick garlic in with the rock salt… a peppercorn here or there doesn’t go amiss either..
And no mention of the herb base you stuff into the Cavity…
But yeah.. overall…. 😛
What a totally pointless thing to do.
How would he feel if he spent a month eating nothing but tofu, or nut cutlets, or anything?
It’s not fucking designed to be eaten 3x a day for 30 days you stupid cunts, and no-one ever does it except for bullshit purposes like this.
It’s not fucking designed to be eaten 3x a day for 30 days you stupid cunts, and no-one ever does it except for bullshit purposes like this.
Actually there’s quite a lot of people in the world, eat the same at every meal. Lot of Africans do.
Actually there’s quite a lot of people in the world, eat the same at every meal. Lot of Africans do.
Well that’s kind of what was avoiding being said.
But anyway, how’s things working out for Africans?
Come to that, how’s things working out for not-Africans? (wait, I think I know the answer to this one…).
I’d be highly surprised if what they eat every day is KFC, but even if that’s true – and having been to Africa (north and east, anyway) it’s not my experience – it’s still very stupid unless you are limited by absolute necessity.
The meals I cook for myself are almost universally a couple of spuds, some cauli, some cabbage, half a dozen sprouts, and a bit of fish. Occasionally pre-cooked chicken. I spice things up with foraged blackberries at this time of year.
So he can get on Netflix innit
The lanyard class has a fatal obsession with what the proles eat (they mean to starve us to death like Kulaks) so it caught The Guardian’s attention, as well as a Netflix producer.
Netflix and all the other too many streaming platforms are still desperate for content, this kind of thing is cheap as chips to make.
Guaranteed 80% of the viewers will look like this
And will do what they think of as a tinkling silvery laugh, with a slight toss of the head, whenever you say something with which they disagree.
If only they knew.
Her double chin is almost invisible – I don’t think 80% will be that slim
As the late, great Magnus Pike said in the 1970’s, “there’s no such thing as bad food, only bad diet”.
Never heard of food poisoning??
no-one ever does it except for bullshit purposes like this.
Yup. It’s the bullshit factor every time.
Intellectual dishonesty and screeching.
“He’s an actor, Jim.”
The Ludovico Technique.
Uhm, the British Left are so desperate from racism they are adopting American racism? The whole ‘black people like fried chicken’ is an American thing – get your own stereotypes!
Also, I do not understand why it’s racist – everyone loves fried chicken.
Can we erect tariffs on stereotypes? Seems a decent enough idea, Cowen could get another “recommended, interesting throughout” article at the Free Press out of it, Caplan goes bonkers.
So, the Colonel’s secret 11 herbs and spices make KFC Ultra Processed.
Who knew?
As with the LGBTQWERTY thing and the Trans vocabulary, I am confused.
I suppose that unprocessed food is raw. Must be good.
We passed through the super-processed food stage so quickly that I missed it.
What exactly is done to raw food to make it ultra processed?
Where can I buy hyper processed food?
If there’s an “ultra-“something, it must be measurable, so what units is it measured in, and what’s the threshold for “ultra-“? 400 nanometres?
Ahh . . . I see the light!