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2020-

2020-10-14 a
BLACK AND WHITE - I

I've always loved fried chicken. But the racism surrounding it shamed me

It should be a source of pride for black people. It’s complicated, though …

Growing up as a black kid in England’s white West Country, a car trip east to the busier, more exciting parts of the country meant one thing: KFC on the way back.

No matter how thrilling the purpose of our trip, the promise of salty, greasy chicken on our return would be the highlight of our day. My brother and I would get excited in the back seat just as the colonel’s bright face was due to make an appearance on the horizon. We knew what was coming.

“Shall we?” Dad would ask, as if it were a question and not an inevitability. Mum would nod, and soon enough I’d be savouring my two pieces of chicken – leg, if I was lucky. I can still smell the sharpness of the lemon hand wipe that would clean me up afterwards.
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Back then, I’d promised myself that as soon as I was old enough, I’d eat fried chicken all the time. Only, by the time I made the move to London in 2000, with its countless chicken shops, I’d read about the inhumane conditions most birds destined for fast-food fryers were subjected to, so my trips to them were rare, often preceded by alcohol and always succeeded by guilt.

Already, I was noticing a pattern. The cheap chicken shops, fronted with happy cartoon chickens, were always concentrated in poorer areas, ones with a bigger black population. I’d muse that if only someone opened a shop serving southern fried chicken, but using free-range birds, they would make a killing.

And so it came to pass.

Shops serving “ethical” fried chicken started popping up all over the place, selling an experience marketed as superior to the neon-lit shops serving food in red-and-yellow cardboard boxes. They boasted about the happy lives their chickens enjoyed, and how they honoured them with 24-hour buttermilk baths and shiny, homemade glazes.

There was almost always a boneless option, too, presumably catering to an audience for whom the skeleton is an unwelcome reminder that what they were eating was once alive. That’s not to say the chicken was not good. Sometimes, it was. But there was always something so far removed from the dish’s origins. It lacked soul.

In the end, I, too, would make a living out of fried chicken, but not southern fried. It was karaage, the Japanese iteration, made with boneless (I know) and skinless chicken thighs marinated in soy sauce, mirin, ginger and garlic.

I became hooked after my Japanese sister-in-law made it for me. For months, I’d make it every weekend, and once I had run out of friends and family to feed it to, I started a supper club so strangers could pay me to make it.

The club was held in my home, with all the furniture pushed back against the wall to make space for collapsible tables, and the menu changed constantly, but karaage was a permanent fixture. And while I loved it, I still preferred regular fried chicken. So why didn’t I sell that instead?

Because I was ashamed.
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Back then, I was not even conscious of the racist baggage fried chicken came with in the US. But it was seeping into my subconscious, and I felt it.

As with most things, what happens in the US winds its way over to the UK. Including, it turns out, racist tropes. In my day job as a writer on a national newspaper – my supper clubs then were still a hobby – I sat next to someone who would often crack the same joke when I stood up to go for lunch. “What you getting?” he’d grin. “Fried chicken?”

It infuriated me, but I could never articulate why. My colleague’s was a specific type of racism, a sort perpetuated by liberals so believing in their supposed lack of prejudice they think they can make racist jokes ironically. (read more)

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