As an ex-KFC employee, this is yet another disappointment to conclude the list of horror stories I have from my 52 day journey through hell.
The full story of my employment is probably best for another write up, but for now I will point out that I was the one in charge of the 'chicken marinating' process for a short while.
The plain and raw chicken bits came in daily, loaded off a truck. At this point, there was nothing special about it. Every day, some poor bastard had the job of going through each box of chicken (where I was, there were probably 6 boxes a day) and opening it up. Inside each box were 10 loose-mesh bags. The kind you could tear, but not without cutting into your hands far more than you are comfortable with. In each bag was 10 pieces of ice cold chicken. Each box would be dumped into this big round plastic drum (for those of you doing the math, that is 100 bits of chicken at a time) and marinated for 5 minutes on tumble (like a washing machine) with this bagged concoction mixed in with water.
The bag your food is mixed with at a first glance looks like it contains some caustic chemical. It was very plain, black on white writing. On the back are ingredients, but it looks more like an MSDS sheet. The top 2 were salt and MSG (although I can't remember in which order), and the rest of the names (there weren't many more) were indistinguishable. The kind of things on ingredient labels that you would normally just pass off as preservatives, color, and a little extra added carcinogens simply for the manufacturer's amusement. Certainly nothing you could expect to find from a grocery store.
The real secret to KFC is not in the '11 herbs and spices'. No, to be honest, the secret is what it's cooked in. It's no surprise that the chicken is deep fried, but KFC takes it one step further. Instead of using regular fryer oil (which is unhealthy enough), they used pure shortening. This stuff comes in huge boxes and it is thicker than butter until heated. It is esentially lard. KFC is the greasiest, saltiest thing anyone will ever taste. That is the only secret. But please, eat up. If there is KFC around me, it's all yours. Hungry or not, I won't be sad to see it go.