A bucket of chicken? That's a proper guilty pleasure

Bad food most definitely has its place
    • The Observer,
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Woman holding deep-fried chicken drumsticks
Food secrets should be filthy. Photograph: Foodcollection.com/Alamy

A few years ago, while presenting a food quiz for radio, I asked the guests what their guilty food secrets were. I can't even recall what I admitted to, let alone most of the panel, but there was one that stuck in the memory. Dear old Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall declared, with a gee-shucks shrug, that he occasionally liked a Snickers bar, cold from the fridge, with a pint of ale. I was dumbstruck. That was his guilty secret? Just that? I felt like I'd asked a nun what she did when she was feeling risqué, only to learn that she sometimes went out without her cardi on.

My guilty food secrets are far filthier than Hugh's. Compared to him I am the Caligula of eating. You name it and I've probably done it. Because if food secrets aren't filthy, what's the point of having them? It was the latest television advertising campaign for KFC that got me thinking about this. I'm sure you've seen it: an observational doc-style interview with a young, fresh-faced employee – I won't patronise him by calling him a cook – going on about his passion for food and the quality of the ingredients that go into their famous fried chicken. We can, I suppose, take some comfort from the fact that the debate on where our food comes from has reached such a point in Britain that even a fast food behemoth like KFC feels the need to big up the sourcing of product and the human element required to execute it.

They're completely wrong, of course. The vast majority of their customers don't give a damn where the stuff comes from. They just like the way the deep-fat fryer gives the outside its familiar salt-rich crunch. It's not about badness or goodness. It's about lunch, and no volume of marketing and advertising cobblers will change that. Then there are people like me, who know it's wrong, who know they'll go to culinary hell for eating it, and who do so very occasionally because of that fact. Don't go telling me it's good. That's not what I want to hear. The man strapped to the wall bars in a Soho torture garden wearing rubber underpants and a gimp mask does not want to be told that the way he gets his jollies is perfectly wholesome. That would ruin it for him. He wants to think of himself as a total pervert. Otherwise what's the point? He does not want to be at ease with himself.

So yes, sometimes I eat total crap. Sometimes, pulling into a motorway service station, faced by a choice between good food ideas done really badly and bad food done well, I will lurch towards the latter. It feels lovely at the time and awful afterwards. Which is the definition of guilt. I know I am not alone in this, because I've talked to others who claim a taste for the good stuff. We have admitted our sins to each other, and been a little purified by doing so. But we still know it's bad, which is the way it should be. Only a fool or a hypocrite would claim that an ethical approach is anything other than a work in progress; in short, into every life a little KFC must fall.

As to Hugh and his fridge-cold Snickers bar with a warm frothy ale, I just hope that there's nothing else to confess. Because if he was ever caught sitting on the floor in the food equivalent of a crack house, a bargain bucket clasped between his warmed thighs, cheeks smeared with grease, surrounded by the gnawed bones of non-free-range chickens, it would be serious news.

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