Double Down Throwdown, Bro!
Justin Panson
Der Skipper and I arranged to meet at the KFC near City College at noon to eat a Double Down sandwich, one of our occasional get-togethers to enjoy cult and legacy fast food items. The Double Down has returned for a mere four weeks after a hiatus of nearly 10 years. Introduced as an April Fools day joke in 2010, it captured the imagination of fools like us who have a strange interest in this type of low culture stunt food. Previous missions have included the return of the Enchirito, Taco Bell’s version of the beef enchilada, and an outing to mark the seasonal appearance of Micky D's engineered pork product, the McRib Sandwich, a delicacy Skip is quite passionate about. When our Double Down plans were set he texted back, "gonna murder some fried chicken." The gimmick sandwich features fried chix cutlets for buns, wrapped around bacon and cheese. It's a fearsome protein bomb with an alarming calorie count, designed to disgust the nutrition minded and otherwise civilized people who believe in moderation and making good decisions. To prepare I fasted for a whole three hours. I'm not gonna lie, there was a moment of fear that I would not be up to the challenge as I peddled in a steady drizzle through Curtis Park toward Sutterville. Skip rolled up in his Subaru, seeming unconcerned by fearsome Double Down, and thus every bit the fast food hero of my fanciful notions. Inside the empty restaurant the crew regarded us misfits with the indifference of minimum wage workers stuck on a food assembly line and surrounded by brightly lit brand propaganda. I ordered a Pepsi, thinking the carbonation might effectively wash down the greasy meal. Skip went with Mountain Dew Sweet Lightning, which he said “Tasted as one would expect. Like liquid garbage.” On the poster, the Double Down was a formidable deep-fried structure to behold. Would this be yet another false promise of hyper-reality? Hell no! Our sandwiches, unboxed and sitting on the wrapping paper, looked nearly as good and crispy and substantial as the color-saturated photo version. The crunch and the savory blend of the Colonel's 11 herbs and spices were insanely good. The savory sauce and bacon complimented the crispness and created a velvety feel sliding down your gullet. Then the overwhelming need to take another bite, and another. A really great tasting sandwich. I almost finished mine but the volume and heft was pretty high impact even for a glutton like myself. Colonel Harlan Sanders was an old cracker with an antebellum fashion sense and probably the unenlightened Jim Crow attitudes to go with it. He was a bible belt traveling salesman hawking chicken broasters to restaurants when he got the idea to set up his own chicken joint in an old gas station. The rest is history. He scaled the southern chicken shack to meet baby boomer demand. The terms “extra crispy” and “finger lickin’ good” have long been embedded in the cultural vernacular. Shared buckets of KFC became a touchstone of mid century childhood. The chain grew to a global empire—cultural imperialism by way of extra crispy drumsticks. I want to think the old Colonel, with his sense of folksy salesmanship, would appreciate the audacity of the Double Down. Media coverage of this freak item has been plentiful, seemingly every self styled food blogger has written this same kind of winking story of performative eating. I love the headline "The Double Down is Back Because God Hates Us" and “This is Why the Terrorists Hate Our Freedom.” A quick Google search turns up expressions of self congratulation, freedom, American triumphalism and defiance…and one grumpy critic called it “the vilest food product ever created by man.” The Washington Post expressed smarmy disappointment, while establishing a context that included Arby’s “Mountain of Meat” and Pizza Hut’s hotdog stuffed crust. The highbrows at the New Yorker magazine called it a “grim curiosity,” noting that this “frankenfood” is a symbol of American gluttony and a harbinger of end times. You think?! They explained the larger symbolism: “This is the defiant spirit of the Double Down and its fellow fast-food provocateurs—a devil-may-care, finger-in-your-eye, patriotic American recklessness. You want three patties on your burger—why not four? And let’s add bacon and onion rings while we’re at it. Tired of wasting bites on mere bread—why not replace that bun with two pieces of chicken?” All the cheeky reportage comprises a beautifully stupid counter narrative to today’s precious, bespoke army of fancy food enthusiasts. Rituals of food-tainment and low-rent connoisseurship indeed. Fuck you. Fuck us all. LONG LIVE THE DOUBLEDOWN, BRO! The folly of our mission is not lost on me. While others work on curing cancer and feeding the poor, we idiots spent part of Saturday afternoon engaged in this silliness. Like the McRib, the Double Down has been engineered to hit all the pleasure centers in our tiny brains. The teams of food scientists should be happy to know their work achieved the desired animal response. We chatted in our booth for a while as we lapsed into a netherworld realm between satisfaction and impending gastric unease. Then my old friend Der Skipper and I parted ways after a nice visit. On the ride home, endorphin bliss and self loathing grappled in my overtaxed psyche. I retreated to spend the remains of the afternoon considering the fleeting mutability of my shallow, wasted life…and I waited for a sign that the Colonel might beam me up to his spaceship of eternal fried chicken bliss. Beam me up, Colonel Sanders! |
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