“Chicken, chicken! Every place I go there is chicken, every step I take, wishbones and drumsticks crunch beneath my soles, while the blisters in battered old chicken skin crepitate eerily. If, as I do, you live in a large city, you’re never more than a few feet away from some disjointed portion of a poultry carcass. If, as I am, you’re the owner of a dog, you’re never more than a few seconds away from having to shove your hand down its throat to try to retrieve a splintery bone.
“Sometimes I think this great alfresco charnel house is only the just resting place for these poor birds’ leftovers – after all, their miserable and truncated lives were spent boxed, then they were exterminated with Einsatzgruppen awfulness, before being flogged in boxes; at least now – albeit in bits – they’re spread about, as if having been subjected to a strange inversion of a Tibetan Buddhist sky burial, whereby human beings scavenge bird corpses rather than vice versa. At other times I project myself into the dim, distant future; surely, in the course of geologic time, these great middens will petrify, forming some hitherto unknown sedimentary rock, one that will cause geologists of the distant future to dub this the Kentuckyzoic era?”
Read the rest of the Real Meals column at the New Statesman website, though given that Self asks “how can anything that tastes this awful be quite so popular?” perhaps it might double up as his Madness of Crowds column too?
