Doubling Down

I promised trash culture. I deliver trash culture.

The other night, my friend and I went down to the KFC/Taco Bell near the University where I teach in order to participate in a cultural phenomenon: The Double Down.

The link I've provided here is a pretty decent explanation of the actual experience of eating it, and I would rather not paraphrase food critics more pithy and accurate than I, but I would like to talk about some of its existential horror and appeal.

My old roommate coined the term "intercourse meals" to describe food masquerading as other food. I am deeply entranced by this. Every year for my birthday I make "meatcake" a layered meatloaf glazed with Worcestershire-Ketchup and "frosted" with garlic mashed potatoes. Its surprisingly tasty if never precisely convincing as a desert. Similarly, I love making melba toasts topped with vanilla and orange creme in the shape of a fried egg. In short, I'm a sucker for visual ruses. So fried chicken pretending at bundom would seem to be right in culinary sweet spot.

On a bit of a side note, I think I can trace this obsession wit mimicry back to my dad's Time-Life nature books, one of which was devoted to clever ruses in nature. The cover showed a kind of aphid-like beastie masquerading as a thorn on a branch. It was both fascinating and terrifying. Creatures could be lurking in any everyday objects: a knot on a tree might be a spider, the broken capitol of an ionic column might be the shell of a hermit crab. It was a world that, more than deceptive, drew delightfully uneasy comparisons

In the culinary world, the gap between fried chicken and bun is not so very great as the gap between meat and cake (or stick and insect), but it nonetheless appeals to that part of me that thrives on indeterminacy. But that is ultimately my problem with the double down. Its not a real sandwich. The chicken is strangely mismatched. One would think that in this modern era of vacuu-formed meats, where McRibs can mimic the non-existent bones in their interior, that you could at least have a piece of fried chicken that resembles a bun, or at the very very rock bottom minimum resembles its sister piece so as to form a grippable, cohesive unit. The interior of this sandwich claims to be a bacon and cheese melt. Sadly it is a single piece of plastic cheese and two meager strips of bacon which would embarrass even a pauper sandwich artist. The chicken is far too thick, the interior is off center. Were it a traditional bread sandwich it would be mocked as an chaotically constructed, abstract joke on sandwichdom. It would be a DaDa sandwich, recognizable only in its obtuse mockery.

I guess what I'm driving at is that I don't need the Double Down to be a successful meal, I just need it to be a successful mimic. Content is irrelevant. Form is all. Let's gloss over the fact that the thing tasted terrible. Let us set aside that for all its weight in my hand, it was unsatisfying in my stomach. We shall not stoop to dwell on the fact that its greasy presence in my stomach gave me all manner of unsettling nightmares. It looked nothing like a sandwich.

I was promised mimicry, all I got was chicken.