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Food

Open and say, uhh?

By JAY CRIDLIN
Published June 21, 2006

So it has come to this.

That's what passed through my mind as I stared down KFC's new all-in-one dinner known simply as "The Bowl."

Truth be told, that would have made a great marketing slogan. Hundreds of thousands of years of human progress, from the cavemen through the Renaissance to the Nuclear Age, and we find ourselves facing a new fast-food option designed to pack a complete meal into a single sinful cradle.

The Bowl contains, in order: a lump of mashed potatoes, a serving of corn, a handful of fried chicken poppers, a ladle of gravy, a smattering of cheese and an entire butterscotch cheesecake.

Okay, we're kidding about the cheesecake. But everything else is there, creating an all-you-can-eat buffet in the palm of your hand; a smorgasbord of country flavors targeting, presumably, consumers who've lost the will to live.

Don't get me wrong - the Bowl tastes great. The ingredients mesh quite well, particularly the chicken and gravy. We are confident that if you order the $3.99 meal, you won't go hungry.

I won't go so far as to call the Bowl the unhealthiest thing on KFC's menu - that honor still goes to the coma-inducing Chicken Pot Pie - but it's close. The more-caloric Rice Bowl, which substitutes rice for the potatoes, contains 770 calories dear lord, 107 carbs (please, make it stop) and 2,750 milligrams of sodium - a tidy 114 percent of the recommended daily allowance. (Go to www.kfc.com for more nutritional information.)

The Bowl is, in many ways, a rudimentary version of that utopian food of the future, the three-course dinner-in-a-pill. Astronauts eat meals like the Bowl; this is what we thought as kids.

The Bowl calls to mind Willy Wonka, who developed a "chewing-gum meal" that tasted of tomato soup, roast beef, mashed potatoes and blueberry pie.

So it has come to this.

In the end, of course, the little girl who can't resist the chewing gum meal, Violet Beauregard, winds up grotesquely rotund, waddling through Wonka's factory.

Violet simply wasn't ready for the concept of a single-bite, all-in-one meal. With the arrival of the Bowl, we must all ask ourselves: Are we?

Jay Cridlin can be reached at (727) 893-8336 or cridlin@tampabay.com.

[Last modified June 20, 2006, 10:35:54]