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D E P T H
World-Chicken in the First Frontier Several weekends ago, London, Ky., hosted the World Chicken Festival. I wish you could’ve been there. It would not have been hard for you to get to London from where you are, which is most anywhere in the world. You just locate London on your map of the Interstate Highway System and come up or down I-75, taking either Exit 41 (where you’ll find seven affordable chain motels) or Exit 38 (five motels, Wal-Mart Super Center, K-Mart, etc.) From where I live, only 25 miles away, it is actually more difficult to get to London. I have to drive in on Highway 229, one of those roads Yahoo steers you away from if you ask for directions from one place to another. Highway 229 goes through a little valley for most of the way, through meadows of ironweed and goldenrod, sometimes skirting the Wilderness Road and Boone’s Trace, two old American routes. (The routes are not only old; they take you through old America. It’s what local tourism officials are calling “America’s First Frontier.”) For most of the trip, 229 avoids civilization. There are houses beside the road and in distant hollows, and trailers and even Big Daddy and Son’s Store, but you know what I mean by civilization: franchise stores where the workers wear uniforms to keep them in their places. They hold the Festival downtown, so you have to come in off the Interstate a mile or so and find parking, which can be a hassle, or else park out near I-75 in one of several strip mall parking lots and take a shuttle bus. It’s worth it to make the effort. The World Chicken Festival has everything you’d want — music, dancing, carnival rides. And food, of course: lots and lots of chicken (some of it fried up in the World’s Largest Skillet), and Chinese, and pizza, and hot dogs, and funnel cakes. At some booths you could get soup beans or shuck beans and corn bread, but people mainly didn’t come to the Festival for food they could have fixed for themselves at home. They came for exotic things like pizza and Chinese chicken-on-a-stick. This might appear to be the kind of small-town festival that shuts down, or turns into a “celebration of the arts,” when locals realize that it is, well, funny, especially to urban sophisticates. Such a realization led Union, S.C., to ditch its annual Kudzu Festival; who’d want to be known among big city folks for whooping it up over a cancerous weed? (Union shortly thereafter became known as the hometown of Susan Smith, famous to readers of supermarket tabloids as “America’s Most Hated Mother.”) Even David Byrne, an artist who usually can’t help being decent and humane, could not keep from sneering at small-town festivals in True Stories. Both his film and the Talking Heads album that goes with it, each of them mostly intelligent, lowered themselves to sarcasm when they might just have taken a shot at transcendence. In “People Like Us,” the rabble-rousing faux-country song John Goodman performs at the film’s climax, the singer’s Papa says, “Be proud of what you are, / There’s something special “bout people like us.” But what you may have taken from that scene, certainly what I took from it back when I was smart and in graduate school, was that sophisticated Americans sneered at small-town inanity, at small-town pride. Thus, we cultural elites may be prepared to react with cheap laughs when some town promotes the World Chicken Festival, a clear case of capital-A Ambition, of not knowing enough to mutter, “Aw, shucks,” toe the dirt with your brogans, and accept your rural insignificance. That was how I felt a few weeks back. I did not start out thinking that I’d be praising the WCF by the end of the day. I had not gone to London for the Festival. Rather, I was in town because I was teaching an American Literature class in the Union College Degree Completion Program at the Bennett Center. My “Americanist” credentials had me all set to scope out small-town silliness. But London’s World Chicken Festival would not yield easy laughs. There are a couple of reasons why. First, like most small towns running weird festivals (alas, not Union, S.C.), London is quite aware that there is something funny about the festival and tells jokes at its own expense. Make sure your audio is running when you click on the WCF website and you’ll note that you are entering the realm of reflexivity. (Yes, the World Chicken Festival is postmodern.)
Then reflect on how this self-awareness inoculates London from the plague of snarkiness some doofus intellectualoids mistake for irony, thus allowing it to operate the Crowing, Strutting, and Clucking Contest with the kind of drop-dead sincerity big cities reserve for cheerfully idiotic displays like the Super Bowl or the Popular Culture Association’s annual wingding. (Yes, the WCF is post-postmodern.) Mostly, though, you should not laugh at the Festival’s claim of world status because it happens to be undeniably true. The festival drew 200,000 in four days this year; Laurel County, of which London is the county seat, has a population of about one quarter that. So, for example, if Chicago wanted to have a similarly successful festival, it would have to draw a little more than 21 million people, or nearly twice the total population of Illinois. Even if you figure that many of Urbana’s residents would make the two-hour trip once, the Chicago World Chicken Festival would have to be very, very special to get them to drive up I-57 a second time. So London’s World Chicken Festival is accurately, albeit immodestly, named. (I admit that I haven’t researched all the chicken festivals around the planet. If you know of another chicken festival that is bigger, please email me.) So World properly modifies Festival. Believe me: I was in the traffic jam on Saturday, right before the World Chicken Festival Grand Parade began, and it was genuinely world class, as frustrating as anything you’d ever run into in a megalopolis on a Friday afternoon (though as you sit fuming in most big city traffic jams you are not regularly enthralled by six-foot-tall pullets rushing down the sidewalk, checking wrist watches, to make it to their floats on time). But World does not only tell us what size festival London hosts. It also tells us what kind of chicken the festival celebrates. Here, friends, is why Laurel County — population right around 50,000, a dot on your Interstate map — had the gall to think it could get away with having an in-your-face bigtime festival in the first place: Laurel County is where Kentucky Fried Chicken was born. Or, to put it another way: Laurel County is where world-chicken originated. The festival does not only celebrate chicken on a huge, world-class scale, but also the commercialized poultry product that, with roots just down Highway 25 in Corbin, has conquered the globe. It’s sort of like Ajaccio, Corsica, having a World Emperors Festival, but not exactly: Napoleon was stopped dead at Waterloo, while Col. Sanders marches on unimpeded. You can find the Colonel’s story on KFC’s informative and entertaining website. The site offers a wealth of nutritional information, a store locator (I just learned that, from where I sit, the nearest KFC is “2.31 miles and should take approximately 5 minutes’ to drive to and that there are three KFC’s within 1.7 miles of the White House), and a cute picture of “Chicken Fanatic” Jason Alexander (the quotation marks are KFC’s). It also preserves the history of world-chicken’s early days — before the Colonel’s went global. KFC is proud of Harland Sander’s “entrepreneurial spirit” and where it has led: “More than two billion of the Colonel’s “finger lickin’ good” chicken dinners are served annually. And not just in North America. The Colonel’s cooking is available in more than 82 countries around the world.” And it is just as proud of its beginnings. You would not think of throwing a rock through the window of a Subway if you were protesting American imperialism, but KFC would certainly do. The Colonel’s success story began long ago in Laurel County, first in the service station that Harland Sanders, an all-American hustler (in the best sense of that word), opened after first earning a living by selling insurance, operating an Ohio River ferryboat, and practicing law in front of justices of the peace. Having developed the mysterious blend of 11 herbs and spices that eventually earned him a spot in America’s culino-cultural pantheon, the Colonel moved shop to the motel/restaurant across the road. That turned into the Harland Sanders Caf” you can visit today. It’s about a mile from Interstate 75. Take exit 29 in Corbin, go past the Wal-Mart Super Center, the Lowe’s, and the Taco Bell, turn right onto 25W; it’s less than a mile, it’s on your right, and you can’t miss it — there’s a huge KFC bucket atop a high pole proudly revolving overhead. You can have a meal there that tastes just like the KFC chicken you buy in Spokane or Tulsa or Beijing. And while you are eating in the Colonel’s original dining room, or just drinking in the atmosphere, you can reflect on the claim made on the historical marker out front, that Harland Sanders is the most famous Kentuckian ever to have lived. Perhaps, like me, you may reflexively consider Muhammad Ali or Abraham Lincoln more famous. But then again, you can see KFC’s point: You have to sort of nod and give credit to someone who says that the Colonel is most famous, for there is an argument to be made. And, besides, given the place of KFC in the global economy and in the semiotics of global popular culture, perhaps my real quarrel is simply nomenclatural: I don’t know that I would disagree a bit if the marker were to claim that Harland Sanders is the most important Kentuckian ever, a man who took local cuisine out of his little railroading town and spread it all over creation.
The raw economics of the KFC story are compelling enough even if, like me, thinking too hard about corporate mergers makes your head hurt. The first big shot who took over after the Colonel sold out his interests in 600 franchises was John Y. Brown, later governor of Kentucky and the husband of a Miss America turned football commentator. KFC has since passed through an astonishingly prototypical array of corporate acquisitions and mergers. It has been owned by Heublein, R.J. Reynolds, and PepsiCo and currently has nearly 11,000 stores employing nearly 300,000 people worldwide.
And through it all, the Colonel has been a constant, a human connection that helps when the multi-millions start getting too outrageous to comprehend. Either he or, after his death in 1990, simulacra — the classic stylized portrait now on the boxes and buckets or that lamentable hep-talking Colonel cartoon atrocity we’re all doing our best to forget — have reminded us of KFC’s human beginnings in Kentucky. “America’s fast food chains were not launched by large corporations relying on focus groups and market research,” writes Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation. “They were started by door-to-door salesmen, short-order cooks, orphans, and dropouts, by eternal optimists looking for a piece of the next big thing.” That is, global fast food, world-chicken, started in places like the First Frontier. But here is the difference between, say, McDonald’s and KFC. We have forgotten who the McDonald brothers were and what they looked like. In fact, it would not surprise me to learn that there never really were any McDonald brothers, that the genesis myth in which they figure was created by Baudrillard disciples in the Theory Department of Hamburger University and inserted into the national mythos through some conspiracy out of Borges or Pynchon by way of Kroc. (By the way: my computer’s spelling device flags “Baudrillard,” “Borges’ and “Pynchon,” but not “Kroc.”) But we know what Harland Sanders looked like; we can go to London, Ky., late any September from now till the corporate world comes crashing down in late-capitalist flames and watch a look-alike contest in which dozens of people vie to look most like a symbol of corporate symbolism. If the fast food branch of globalization has a face, it is either Ronald McDonald’s or the Colonel’s, and I can introduce you to someone who lives on the block where the Colonel once lived. There was a sign of the Colonel’s success and a confirmation of London’s pride in world-chicken quite recently. Earlier this month, protesters in Islamabad, upset over American bombing of Afghanistan, trashed and torched a KFC. This is the kind of event that turns you awfully smart awfully fast. It is almost impossible to mis-read its semiotics. Your nephew in the 11th grade, the clueless one who still wears his cap backwards and jeans baggy, could tell you what the KFC attack means. “No matter where you are in the world, you learn to recognize the unofficial and still deeply meaningful symbols of American culture, myth, imperialism, etc. The flag and “Star-Spangled Banner” signify America, but so too do the Golden Arches and the Nike swoosh.” And so on. The only people who might not come up with a quick and accurate reading are professional semioticians, people paid to tease out complexities or create complexities where there is only elegant simplicity, and even those of us in the professorial class might just admit that this one’s a gimme. While it is not exactly the archetypal symbol of America that Coca Cola and McDonald’s are, KFC comes close. If not the, it is a target of choice. It is so definitively American that no one would think you absolutely crackers if you were express your rage at Uncle Sam by burning his goateed cousin the Colonel in effigy. You would not think of throwing a rock through the window of a Subway if you were protesting American imperialism, but KFC would certainly do. If you wanted to express an opinion regarding globalization and had a choice between Wendy’s and the Colonel’s, you’d choose KFC. Thus, too, the world-chicken-hating mob of semiologists in Islamabad and, thus others, even earlier, elsewhere. For example, in Prague last year, anti-IMF demonstrators damaged a KFC. Later in 2000, demonstrators in Cairo attacked a KFC. Embassy-bombing protests in China in 1999 and anti-globalization demonstrations in India in 1996 each involved violence against KFC restaurants. It would have been nice, I suppose, had the Colonel kept the secret to himself and a few hundred Corbinites, but there came the Interstate with all its cars, and what was Harland Sanders to do? Not that KFC is ignorant of its place in global politics or seeks to suppress information thereof. In fact, you can go to its Web site for a good, recent — and in retrospect, thought-provoking –indication of how readily KFC associates its success as a corporation with that of the United States as a hegemonic power. An item from Aug. 3, 2001 is headlined “U.S. Pentagon Locks Up KFC Top Secret Recipe.” It is not about the real recipe, which is literally locked up in a safe in Louisville and figuratively in a few executives’ brains. Instead, the headline is a cute way of telling you that Tricon, KFC’s current corporate owner and ‘the world’s largest multibranded company,” has opened a three-fer (or ‘multibranded”) Express franchise (including Pizza Hut and Taco Bell products, besides KFC) in the Pentagon’s food court. The release goes on to offer details of the Pentagon’s vastness — it is “virtually a city in itself with floor space greater than three times that of the Empire State Building in New York” — which it then immediately follows with corporate muscle-flexing: “Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc. (NYSE:YUM), based in Louisville, KY is the world’s largest restaurant company in terms of system units with over 30,000 restaurants in over 100 countries and territories.” The fast-food/military/industrial/hegemonic equation is simple, elegant, and right out there for you to see. That’s the kind of corporate-“ber alles chest-thumping that can make you feel cruddy about liking Extra Crispy” even when you’re scarfing a bucket with all the fixin’s. And you do not have to be an especially ardent enemy of corporate foods (including world-chicken) to find about three deep-fried coatings of irony in KFC’s claim that Original Recipe” Chicken is the opposite of “bland, processed, mundane fast food.” As a matter of fact, KFC chicken, like any fast food you can name, is — admit it — deracinated, tasty but not distinguished, a perfectly bland, processed, mundane product for a nation — for a world — that yearns desperately to turn into fifties-era car culture Southern California (Schlosser, passim). It is not treasonous for me to tell you that the best fried chicken in Kentucky is not Kentucky Fried Chicken. Actually, I have no idea what is the best; but I can tell you that eating at the Sander Caf” is a more satisfying symbolic than eating experience (though, as symbolic experiences go, it is very nearly transcendent: you will tell people you did it). The chicken you eat in people’s homes and at roadside restaurants in Kentucky tastes quite different from the Colonel’s. It is saltier and greasier, fried a darker brown and not pressure-cooked to seal in juiciness (or, if you’re nauseated by chicken that squirts when you bite into it, wetness). It is what you still see at Sunday dinners and on burdened kitchen tables when neighbors pitch in to make food for recent widows and widowers. Of course, it is symbolic too, but not in any manner that warrants festivals: It is not world-chicken. But the Colonel’s is. So even little London has its place in global culture. It would have been nice, I suppose, had the Colonel kept the secret to himself and a few hundred Corbinites, but there came the Interstate with all its cars, and what was Harland Sanders to do? You can’t stand in the way of all those cars. Food changed to keep up with Americans’ love of the automobile. You needed something you could eat with one hand: a burger, or fries, or a crispy chicken leg. You were going somewhere and couldn’t slow down long enough to use forks or drape a napkin across your lap. As the Colonel and others recognized, Henry Ford revolutionized not only travel but cuisine. And now everyone owns a car. Every teenager in my town has either a Silverado or an F-150, every K-Mart department head drives a Buick, and every small town professor lurches along in a 10-year-old Probe that sheds paint flakes when it goes faster than 30 mph. They all need chicken and burgers. And, for Pete’s sake: They even have Toyota pickups in Afghanistan. So, what I’m saying is, attend next year’s World Chicken Festival. You’ll find yourself stepping back from the carnival atmosphere now and then, perhaps to reflect, perhaps just to catch your breath. (There’s so much to do.) In either case, your focus will be local, not global, and your mind may turn to history, to the way the past infiltrates the present. Then your mind will reverse itself, and you’ll find yourself thinking about the highway, getting home before dark, the world. Your perspectives will shift; let them. You’ll look up from chewing on an elephant ear or some other delicious wad of sugar-spattered fried dough and, hey, what do you know? There’s a perfect little 12-year-old Col. Sanders walking to the Look-Alike Contest. There he goes, past Kentucky Sound System, then across the street and past Bob’s Ready to Wear, where you can find the quality clothing you can’t get in warehouse stores near the Interstate. Jimmy Dean Smith is an associate professor of English and communications at Union College in Kentucky and a contributing editor to PopPolitics. Related Sites |
