Ftrain, by Paul Ford

"The Word of Mouth KFC challenge," Tim Hayward, The Guardian:

I'm not going to lie to you. If your paper gives you moral carte blanche to wolf it down in the name of research, and when it's hot and fresh from the bucket, KFC is gorgeous. I haven't eaten chain fast food for a long time and the combined hit of chicken, fat and flavour was disorientatingly powerful. It's the sort of comprehensive sensory seeing-to that's both best and worst about drink, drugs and sex. So very good and so very bad. No wonder teenagers live on this stuff. But trying to apply any kind of critical approach to the flavour was surprisingly hard. I can't tell you what that famous mixture of 11 secret herbs and spices actually tastes of, because I couldn't distinguish any particular flavours amid the assault.