I had a dentist appointment yesterday with a cleaning and some fillings on the docket and a lunch break scheduled between the two procedures. While I considered trying to find some place nearby that had a really leafy, stinky salad to treat my dentist to the remnants of during my fillings, I could find no such place. There was a KFC around the corner, though, and I had recently had a hankering for that anyway.

What a huge disappointment it turned out to be. The biscuit tasted like buttery sweaty socks (I have tasted sweaty ones but not buttery ones, so I’m sort of projecting), the mac and cheese smelled vaguely vomity, and even the mashed potatoes and gravy failed to live up to my memory of them. But worst of all was the chicken. Oh, the breading was tasty enough, but if you got a bite of chicken without any breading, it was dry and basically tasteless.

For reading material, I had brought The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I had just begun the section on fast food. It’s possible that reading some of that prior to lunch colored my perceptions, though I think maybe not, as I’m really not all that suggestible. One thing I couldn’t help recalling was the statement by the author of my other big meat book I bought recently that when taking the life of a sentient being in order to eat it, you shouldn’t do so lightly. I can say confidently that the chicken I had for lunch yesterday was not worth taking the life of the animal I ate, pitiful though that life may have been.

This experience puts me one step closer to foregoing any meat but that which seems to have been raised well and fed properly, even if it’s more expensive. There are plenty of vegetarian options I’ll gladly eat to balance out some of the increased cost of meat.