KFC's Double Down: caught between fat and a salty place

KFC's new sandwich is a high point in human evolution, Dalton McGuinty's fault, and best avoided by ZZ Top.

KFC's ludicrous bunless sandwich creation has finally hit Canadian restaurants, and like the proverbial gruesome car crash, the pundits daren't look away.

The Globe and Mail’s Mark Schatzker informs us that at 540 calories, the sandwich “is the energy equivalent of two shot glasses of gasoline. A single Double Down, if burned efficiently, could heat a small bucket of ice-cold water to the point of boiling.” Good to know, should you become lost and snowbound on the way back to your car in the KFC parking lot. But we should respect the Double Down, Schatzker says, because it “heralds a new era in our post-agro-industrial-food society.” For millennia grains and bread have been a staple of the human diet, but “thanks to KFC, fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, cutting-edge strains of genetically modified corn and soy and the spectacular food-converting ability of the modern-day industrial broiler chicken” bread has become obsolete.

“You’re never quite sure what Premier Dad McGuinty will ban next,” begins a baffling piece by Sun Media’s Christina Blizzard, but it’s clear her uncertainty will not hinder her anger at the Ontario premier. It’s rumoured that the Liberals might ban the sandwich on health grounds, and Blizzard is either upset that they will, or upset that they won’t. It’s not clear which. Health Promotion Minister Margarett Best did put out a statement saying unequivocally that they would not, but Blizzard says “that’s not what the dozen or so reporters who were listening to her words heard. They came to the conclusion the government was considering taking action.” There you have it readers: Oct. 20, 2010. The day reporters started making up the news.

If you’d like to know how it feels to eat a Double Down, but not how it feels to slip into a sodium-and-fat-induced coma, luckily the Torontoist staff has tried it for you and discovered a crucial logistical flaw: “without a bun to soak up the juices, all the grease is free-floating. It squirts onto the lips and the chin. And if the chin happens to be covered with a beard, then forget it.”