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KFC, We Hardly Know Ye


Who knew thoughts of fried chicken could actually make someone sad? But it did this week when I read a USA Today article that claimed more than 60% of American young adults, ages 18 to 25, don’t recognize Col. Harland Sanders or know what KFC stands for. And this group is the generations-old chicken chain’s key demographic.

In China, where Kentucky Fried Chicken is huge, my students used to grill me about the bearded, bespectacled man in a western bow tie. His images and story are plastered all over the restaurant walls in Asia. “Is he Santa Claus?” a few asked. “Did he invent fried poultry?”

At least they cared enough to inquire. American kids don’t seem to care much about the colonel. Is that the end of the world, not to know a bit of fast-food history? No. But it is, I think, another little indication of our ebbing cultural narrative.

And when I unexpectedly ran across Josh Ozersky’s article about Col. Sanders in Time, I felt strangely vindicated for my sadness. He says:

For anyone who grew up in America in the second half of the 20th century, the Colonel was a true icon. You didn't need to be able to read to know who he was; you didn't even need to watch TV. Anyone who drove a mile in any direction would see his beaming, grandfatherly visage and white suit and know that Kentucky Fried Chicken could be found there. Maybe not everybody knew that he was the chain's founder or remembered his TV commercials from the '60s and '70s, when he talked about how each piece was dipped in an "egg warsh" before frying. But, at least, they knew he was real. Half of the young adults in the survey, which was ordered up by the chain, assumed that he was the creation of KFC, rather than the other way around. I find this very disturbing. … it hurts me as an American to think that so many people lack such a basic piece of cultural information.

Theodore Dalrymple, a British author and psychiatrist, commented on the significance of understanding the past in Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project, saying:

The importance of knowing history is that one realizes that one is the recipient of a tradition. That the world didn't begin with oneself, nor will it end with oneself. Ignorance of history has the effect that people don't think even of their own lives in historical terms. Without history nothing has any meaning. People don't understand that life is a biography, and they don't actually see that what they've done earlier in their lives has any impact on what happens to them afterwards. … If you don't have a certain knowledge of history then you can't understand anything, actually, about the modern world.

Yes, in this case the tradition might be “just” a secret blend of 11 herbs and spices and a man dressed in white. But the lack of understanding regarding this culinary/cultural icon who died only 30 years ago still makes my heart wince.