WHY?
I was walking home tonight and I passed the KFC on 14th St, just as I was thinking to myself, "I should get something cheap and quick to eat, since my apartment is in boxes and everything is chaos, so cooking at home seems like an impossible hassle."
That's when it hit me: curiosity.
What is the Double Down like?
EATING THE DOUBLE DOWN
The first thing I noticed about the Double Down is that, despite its horrific reputation, it is not really the most terrible thing on the menu. Thanks to New York City's calorie intake law, I knew that it was 1090 calories. Which, you know, is pretty bad -- it's half of your daily value -- but it's not at the top end of the KFC menu.
Once I had the sandwich (if you can all it that) in hand, it was easily apparent why. It is no larger than your average KFC entree, about ten bites worth of meat. The two pieces of chicken are about the same size as the normal in-sandwich meat. It's just two layers -- like a Whopper or some such. And yeah, it has cheese, mayo, and bacon, but so does like everything else.
I ate it pretty quickly, feeling pretty disappointed. I feel as though the cruel reputation of the Double Down as being "the worst thing" or being "basically suicide" had created a certain set of expectations that it didn't fill.
POST-SANDWICH EXPERIENCE
When I finished, I was still hungry. I have a theory that the body knows empty calories and doesn't accept them, and it certainly was true about this double-down. I felt as though I hadn't eaten anything.
After about three or four minutes, my stomach started to react to the sandwich. I imagine this is what the now-discredited boiling frog from Al Gore's metaphor feels like. I was still hungry, mind you -- my stomach didn't seem to note that I had eaten anything, it just noted that I was feeling terrible. Although, I feel about this bad when I eat greasy food like this normally.
Pretty soon, I broke down and had to go somewhere else to get some actual sustenance, hoping for something else to quiet it down.
TAKE AWAY
If you were curious what the Double Down is like, know what I should have known: it's basically just a shitty KFC sandwich that gets your hands greasy because there's no bread.
