The Fat Diaries: "Healthier" Fast Food? No Thanks
ABC hosted a news nugget that I thought pertinent enough to discuss here. Apparently franchise owners of Kentucky Fried Chicken are suing their own cooperation for their relentless marketing of KFC’s grilled chicken. While other branches of fried chicken restaurants have been in the black this year without resorting to promoting healthier options, YUM cooperation’s ads are seen by franchise managers as detrimental to sales, forcing them to throw out crates of grilled chicken every day.
It seems a strange sort of backlash from the healthier-option movement that’s been rocking the fast food world. For years now fast food has been trying to adapt to public demand for healthier choices and less junk on our plastic trays. While I appreciate a lot of the effort put forth these days there’s an important question that fast food needs to ask itself: if it’s healthier, does that mean we’ll buy it? Apparently not.
Can we all agree on one thing off the bat? The healthiest food is prepared with good cuts of meat with minimum seasoning that’s cooked well and eaten shortly thereafter. I’m getting a little tired of this quasi-health food from food chains that should know better. If we’re talking business models, look at Popeye’s which is doing pretty well this year and hasn’t tried to sell us a thinner waistline. Although KFC’s grilled chicken may be healthier than its original recipe chicken, it’s all kind of relative. This is the chain that invented the “double-down,” for corn’s sake, right?
Let’s take two average chicken breasts from KFC, one fried and one grilled. (Here’s KFC’s nutrition chart.) While you’re getting only 190 calories with the grilled instead of 320, you’re still getting a whopping 550 mgs of sodium with it (instead of 710 mgs). There’s 0 trans fats, but that also goes for the fried chicken. It’s not health food, it’s healthier food. There’s also a very personal reason that I won’t eat grilled chicken from KFC, apart from the MSG. It tastes pretty bad.
If we take it for granted that ANY chicken from a fast food restaurant is bad for you and then let taste decide where to blow those $30 dollars for a family bucket, which would you opt for? As for me, I get fried chicken maybe four times a year. It’s been a tradition that we eat fried chicken every 4th of July and every Super Bowl. Once or twice a year we’ll be in the mood for it and swing by for a bucket. I get fried chicken because I want fried chicken. I don’t go because I want it grilled; my dad-in-law makes the best grilled chicken I’ve ever eaten, so why bother? I don’t have a fryer at home so I can’t make it myself–specifically because I don’t WANT a fryer at home. That way leads swiftly to madness. I get fried, I eat it, I’m happy. I don’t have to go back there for another 5-10 months. The end.
The problem is that we want the fast food companies to make healthier foods but the corporations who are listening to us (or pretending to listen) are doing it badly. The food is still not healthy enough to be good for anyone, and it tastes foul in the meantime. And it doesn’t sell. Franchisees are losing money and business. Fast food either needs to come up with better tasting food that is actually healthy (which given how much money they spend on the average serving is unlikely) or we need to stop buying our kids fast food. It’s time to fall back and regroup.
I plan to start by choosing when to take my family out for fast food. I only go out for it rarely so it doesn't consume our lives. I control what goes into my kids’ stomach and I can teach them how to eat. When they get old enough to get their own meals, I will have taught them how important it is to eat healthy foods, get exercise and to make smart decisions. Fast food will be around forever, but the obesity problem in the US doesn’t have to be. By making our own decisions and not forcing chains to make them for us, we take back some of that control.
