Month: March 2016

Foodies knock McDonald’s and KFC off their diet plans

Posted on by Martin Newman

A miracle, of sorts, happened over the Easter weekend – I was lured into KFC for the first time in 10 years.

As a dedicated foodie (low-grade restaurant critic and food fad follower) and partly health-conscious parent, major fast food outlets like KFC or McDonald’s are anathema.

But a viral social media campaign for a black chicken burger – somehow – totally got into my head.

The ‘black zinger’, something that sounds like a banned firework or a fable whispered at bedtime, was KFC’s attempt to wrest back some of the momentum from the street food chefs and post-modern iterations of food vans that have sprung-up everywhere, reinventing and reinvigorating notions of fast food.

And with burger wars going on in Sydney, London, New York and most of the world’s capitals, it’s hard to avoid becoming a half-arsed expert on the subject.

Every hot new chef on the scene wants to outgun the opposition with not only the best ingredients, but also the most Instagrammable photo of a luxuriantly over-the-top burger, oozing melted cheese and grease from the griddle.

It’s made me and a lot of other bored consumers suckers for the next big experience in food, whether it’s a burger stuffed between ramen noodles, a kilogram wagyu pattie or a brisket topper that has been smoked in a plastic bag (this has really been done) and handed to you in a cloud of charcoal fumes.

And along the way an interesting thing has happened. The big fast food chains, who were determinedly reducing their calorie count in the face of decades of bad press about the poor nutritional value of their menus, have fallen off the diet wagon.

They are still selling salads and fruit and have, over time, toned down some of their ingredients, but they are now peddling unashamedly fatty meals.

At McDonald’s you can load up those insipid French fries with bacon bits and melted cheese to blow an extremely large hole in your daily allowance of calories, cholesterol and fat.

Gone too is any embarrassment over that legacy of unhealthy eating that spawned Morgan Spurlock’s cringingly-watchable 2004 doc Super Size Me on the negative health consequences of a steady diet of Maccas.

Instead the company is falling over itself to win a piece of the booming comfort food market, and introducing an all-day breakfast menu (following the growing trend for brunches).

KFC, who carried out one of the most successful rebranding exercises in corporate history, seamlessly dropping the (unhealthy sounding) ‘fried chicken’ from their name in favour of a hip hop style contemporary abbreviation, is following suit.

They have even started using the figurehead Colonel Sanders in their advertising again – something not seen in 21 years. The company, which three years ago, recorded a 15% plunge in profits has since turned the business around by plugging into the social media generation and better engaging people like me.

And so it was I came to be sitting in the restaurant’s Arncliffe branch on the Princes Highway on Easter Sunday. I’d already driven my kids nuts with two days of crooning Iggy Azalea’s Black Widow, but substituting ‘black zinger’, so they were happy just to see me get on with it.

The less than subtle online advertisements show a burger that looks like it’s been forged in the fires of hell, with a lustrous teak-tough bun and the rest looking like some Pixar Studios creation of verdant lettuce and oozing juices.

The ‘black zinger’ itself is a chicken burger in a bun stained black with vegetable carbon. The bun is dotted with nigella seeds and in between is one of KFC’s trademark spicy chicken fillets, chilli flakes, lettuce, tomato, cheese, bacon and mustard & maple sauce.

Essentially it’s a chicken burger – that’s black.

There’s nothing else to it. That’s it.

Call it a triumph of advertising.

Anyway, you kind of expect franchise food to look nothing like the expertly cooked, photographed and tweaked version in the ads, but even so I was a bit underwhelmed when I opened the box.

I’ve become so accustomed to fancy burgers created with indulgent care that a production-line job just doesn’t seem to sit together right. The different elements are like a plastic toy that just slides apart, and that’s what the ‘black zinger’ looked like.

It’s a fair enough concept, even tasted good, but it lacked that personal short-order chef attention to detail to get it over the line.

The bun looked like sponge cake and was a little like sponge, the bacon didn’t look fried (baked, poached maybe?), the cheese wasn’t melted and the sauce was on the base rather than poured over the top.

Unfortunately for KFC to compete with the Juicy Lucy’s or the Mister Gee’s of the world it needs a guy or gal on a griddle toasting the bun and warming the cheese as it’s assembled and dousing it with sauce so the whole thing sits together properly. That’s something that in a high-turnover environment like the one they have, is not going to happen.

But the attempt to disrupt or, at the very least, ride on the coat tails of what is happening in the low-brow dining market shows that the big firms are worried and conscious that if they don’t change they risk losing the market.

Sex, lies & politics: The Peta Credlin – Tony Abbott ‘affair’

Posted on by Martin Newman

So were Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin at it?

The evidence ranged against them, one or two perceived moments of tenderness mostly not associated with a work relationship, a head rested on a shoulder, protective outbursts from the PM.

The rumour mills were so over-extended NSW Liberal MP Concetta Fierravanti-Wells felt the need to deliver an ultimatum to Abbott to deal with it.

“Politics is about perceptions,” she told him bluntly.

But should perceptions be enough to cost someone their job? And once it’s ‘out’ must the rumour-mongers be sated.

The question of sacking the Prime Minister’s chief of staff is a moot point now of course, but the ongoing damage to her career legacy is very much alive.

In the final days of the Abbott government, in the lead-up to that last brutal push to unseat him, it was not Abbott who was the target of the plotters.

He’d been given a walloping in the previous failed coup over the knighthood awarded to Prince Philip, weathered it and came back with an improved poll standing.

But when laying the groundwork for another go, it was Credlin who was identified as both the easier mark and the most effective means of undermining the PM.

She had directed his career from, at times, abject ineptitude in opposition to a decisive, commanding, if no-less controversial, presence in politics. He needed her there to govern.

The attacks on Credlin were almost nonsensical – an insult to the public intellect.

She was accused of having “too-high a profile” and the prime minister’s refusal to sack her for it was painted as being blinkered and an indication of internal rot.

Credlin was Abbott’s perceived Achilles heel –hurting her would leave him weaker.

Stubbornly, loyally he stuck by her. “Do you really think my chief of staff would be under this kind of criticism if her name was Peter?” he asked.

It was a good point.

In the UK, the close relationship between Tony Blair and his bullying mouthpiece Alastair Campbell didn’t produce calls for him to resign or be sacked. They too had a cosily iron grip on the agenda that left even the Treasurer on the outer. But Campbell was regarded as too dangerous to take on – a formidably strong lieutenant to the PM.

Credlin’s was a different story – she was a woman.

A seasoned political backroom operator she’d built a reputation in the Howard government as an astute strategist working for a number of MPs, then in opposition as top aide to Liberal leaders Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Abbott.

She had paid her dues many times over, and yet there have been fewer more transparent or malicious whispering campaigns carried out in politics than that on Credlin during the short reign of Tony Abbott.

The rumours about the pair had been the subject of gossip throughout politics and the media, but had never been aired publically until this week.

Privately Credlin was painted as a Delilah figure. She had her hooks in him, siren-like, fouling his judgment and poisoning his leadership.

I use that biblical comparison because the narrative of the scheming, manipulative women has been around for thousands of years. And it is routinely trotted out when critics can’t make conventional headway. See The Tragedy of Othello, Shakespeare knew it too.

In Australia we saw it with the jibes at Julia Gillard’s husband’s sexuality, and by association her own.

There is no question Credlin came to be widely disliked within the party and the control she exerted over the PM’s diary became a sticking point for many.

But the malignant undermining, the creeping, unsubstantiated sniggering at the morals of the government, went beyond all professional criticism.

I doubt there was any affair. This is politics and she was solely a means to get at Abbott.