Food: The Final Frontier

Fried chicken is delicious, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a dirty liar.

I can’t drive past a KFC billboard without recalling decades-old family dinners. The four of us would gather around a steaming bucket of chicken while Home Improvement reruns provided the soundtrack. My mom would take a wing and a leg, my dad would take a breast and a leg, my brother would take a wing and a leg, and I would take two legs. These occasional KFC evenings went on for years before poultry economics occurred to me. If everyone was eating legs, the best part, where was the rest of the chicken? Was there a massive scrap bucket, filled with hearts and heads and other inedible things that popped up in McNuggets, or was there a laboratory somewhere in Kentucky filled with multi-legged chicken hydras? These were troubling thoughts. I wanted to trust something so delicious, but the math just didn’t add up.

Years later I tried tofu and, surprisingly, I liked it. My chicken calculations vanished and I enjoyed something I could not explain. Tofu simply was. There is no free-range tofu, no 4H kids inspecting it or government agency giving it a stamp of approval. For all I know, tofu falls to Earth in a meteor. I couldn’t pick “soy” out of a line-up. I have sincere doubts that “field roast” is roasted, and I take on faith that it comes from a field in the first place. These Vegan near-meats are an enigma.

I want to eat tofu in the same way I want my car to fold up into a suitcase, or fold out into a giant battle-robot, or to travel through time when it hits eighty-eight miles per hour. I’ll eat soy-anything the same way I’ll use my cell phone and pretend it’s a communicator.

Budget-futurists always portray food of the future as tofu – bland, jiggling cubes of a mysterious substance completely unrelated to anything traditionally defined as food. In space, nobody eats fried chicken. Astronauts and Space Marines eat whatever is synthesized in the wall compartments of their cafeteria. They eat this mystery non-meat and then they battle Cylons or Cyber-Men or Chronus.

I may not be able to live in that sort of world, but at least I can eat like it. Bring on the tofu. Now if only they would bread and deep-fry it…