Month: July 2021

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My Latest KFC Review: Still Terrible

Reflection of the KFC restaurant in a pool.

KFC was one of my favorite fast-food restaurants out there. With its menu of coleslaw, mashed potatoes & gravy, fried chicken, as well as biscuits with jam and butter, KFC had a solid menu of gustatory harmony.

KFCfooditems
Photo by Aleks Dorohovich.

But about a decade ago, things changed. My family and I were given undercooked fried chicken – so undercooked that we had to ask them to fry it again. Even after the request, the chicken bits were oozing pink blood, so my mom had to cook them at home herself before we had any. After witnessing such poor quality, we stopped going to KFC for a while.

After years of staying away and eating Chick-Fil-A instead, our nostalgia for KFC kicked in as we remembered how good the combinations of coleslaw, chicken, and biscuits were.

And so, after about a decade, we made our way back to the same KFC store that served us bloody chicken pieces to order an 8-Piece Fill Up which contains eight crispy chicken, two plastic bowls of mashed potato and gravy, one plastic bowl of coleslaw and four biscuits. With packets of jam on the side like ketchup.

My Latest KFC Review

And I have to say… KFC once again disappointed us!

The “crispy” chicken just had a thin coat of fried batter-like substance which peeled off when bit into. And the biscuits had become smaller and more stale than ever before.

My family and I did finish our lunch (unsatisfactorily) with much of the coleslaw and mashed potato and gravy left over. The two menu items tasted relatively the same as they did about twenty years ago, so they weren’t horrible. But as our tastes have improved over the past decades, the menus were simply “not so bad as to be inedible,” i.e. just tolerable for consumption.

Photo by Kina.

How can a fast-food restaurant with arguably a menu better than Chick-Fil-A be so terrible?

I just couldn’t understand it; neither could my family. And after browsing online, I found that many people shared our sentiment towards the fast food restaurant: pure disappointment.

I couldn’t find a reliable source clearly explaining the reasons behind the downfall of KFC’s quality over the past years, but from the bits of information I could gather, it appears that Colonel Sanders, the founder of the restaurant chain, sold it to someone else. Hence the changes for the worse. Whatever may be the reason, hopefully KFC manages to improve. Because if it doesn’t anytime soon, I could see it shut down for good.

Photo by Maxime Lebrun.

I know for a fact that KFC fares better with the public in Asia such as in South Korea and Japan.

Perhaps it’s the problem with local management rather than the menu or the company. Hopefully the KFC opening soon nearby my place is better than the one I had for today’s lunch. Hopefully I’ll write a positive KFC review next time.

It’ll be the last chance my family and I give to our once-beloved Kentucky Fried Chicken.

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Ducklings Attacked: A World of Survival

A lonely duck swimming by itself in a foggy lake.

This evening when the sun started to set, my mother and I came upon a mother duck and her two ducklings. Where I live, it’s common to find ducks, ducklings, rabbits, squirrels, and lizards. Anyways, I have an affinity to ducklings after rescuing them a couple of years back with my family (check out the post HERE) so I pay close attention whenever I encounter them. And watching them, I found it odd to see that there were only two ducklings trailing behind their mother.

I also spotted a great white bird resembling a heron lurking nearby.

A heron-like bird flying above water.
Something like this bird, but the legs were leaner and the beak yellowish. And it had a much slender, meaner face. Photo by Bob Brewer.

Perhaps it was a heron. But I can’t tell as I am no expert on birds). And from the look of it and from my past memory of witnessing a cruel Canadian goose murder a duckling in another pond, I had this premonition of imminent danger for the little ducklings.

Ducklings Attacked

My fears were realized when the heron-like bird closed in on the two ducklings bobbing around. The mother duck fluttered its wings in protest or perhaps to make itself look bigger to scare off the predator. The details of their interaction I could not understand; but I could tell clearly who were the prey and who was the predator.

Now, one might say it isn’t right to interfere with the world of nature, as animals eating and getting eaten is the way of nature.

But from my understanding, human interference is also part of nature, as humans are part of the ecosystem as well.

And it just didn’t seem right to do nothing while the mother duck and her ducklings got attacked by the mean-looking heron that was inching closer and closer.

So I yelled at the thing and chased after it when it got too close to the scared ducklings. But the heron wouldn’t fly away from the pond: no matter how much I ran and yelled at it, it would dart away or fly a little bit only to come back to the pond. It wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t giving up on what it set its eyes on.

I did all I could to condemn the heron, running at it to scare it off.

But the sun sank lower and lower behind the horizon and I had to go. I had to leave the mother duck and her two ducklings hovering in a corner of the pond with the heron still in their vicinity. What became of them, I don’t know. But I have a terrible feeling that the heron got its way.

World of Survival

As I sit here writing, I cannot help but think how ruthless the world is.

In this world, there is no mercy for the little ducklings or any other preys that are at the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter how little or young they are. There is no mercy for little baby animals who meet weak parents or incompetent, foolish parents who lead them to dangerous places (e.g. drainage ditches, areas of lakes where there are hostile, cruel geese & etc.). Same goes for people. If one fails to develop necessary skills for survival and/or success, it’s a tough, tough world out there. (And instead of predators like herons, we have conmen, cheaters, criminals, immoral beings and many more that make life much more difficult than it already is). Plus, there is no mercy for actions as well as inactions: there are consequences no matter what. Our world, like the world of animals, is a world of predators and prey.

It is a world of survival.

lonely mother duck
Photo by Kendal.

Update #1: I’ve revisited the pond a few days later. To my grief, I only found a single duck like the image shown above. (The duck shown above is NOT the duck I saw). I have no way to tell, but by the look and timing of it, the lonely duck that I saw about two days after the said event seemed like the mother duck. It was floating in the exact pond where the horrible event probably took place. The female duck was motionless. A couple of days later, I saw it start to move a little. Now, it is no longer at the pond. It was heartbreaking.

Update #2: Today on October 7th, I spotted the heron-like creature again! It may be the same heron that attacked the ducklings. It may not be. But the bird looks very similar to the one I saw attacking the ducklings:

Video of the heron that looks very similar to the one that attacked the ducklings.
I think it’s hunting for small fish.

P.S. Here is a 2002 journal article that explores the very topic of interfering with nature: “Why Not Interfere with Nature?” by Mark A. Michael. I wish I were in school again to read the full article!