Chick Fil A

Okay, confession time. I ate everything before I remembered to take a picture. Rookie mistake.

But let me tell you what there was: two chicken sandwiches.

And let me tell you what there wasn’t: waffle fries.

Let’s unpack that.

I don’t hate fries, we can start there. I like the fry, I respect the fry, and I appreciate how the ubiquity of the fry encapsulates America’s indomitable, illogical, self-harming need for excess. Turns out no one needs a pile of starch after eating twelve hundred calories of bun and burger, yet, even as the body begs for mercy, the hands move unbidden from plate to mouth again and again and again until the ping of fingernails on bare porcelain makes the subconscious conscious and you’re forced to confront all the guilt you didn’t realize you were repressing. It’s an absurd ritual we’ve somehow normalized by saying things like “Clean your plate”, “Get your money’s worth”, and “Oh, you’re not gonna eat your fries?” As though not finishing the last eighteen cents of potato is a sign of rudeness, of fiscal irresponsibility, of surrender. Fries are a restaurant’s way of making sure you can’t complain about leaving hungry and should be treated as such. But I really do love the fry. Like many great foods, the fry is just a vessel for sodium. Probably the purest vessel, since potatoes have flavor in the sense that YES you are tasting something, but that something is nothing. Fries are a texture, salted. And that texture is glorious, especially when introduced to Chick fil a’s collection of sauces, but it’s never going to be as glorious as a Chick Fil A chicken sandwich. A sandwich and fries might be Batman and Robin, but wouldn’t you rather have two Batmans?

I can almost even convince myself it’s healthier to replace the fries with another chicken sandwich. Fries have zero nutritional value. You’re taking a vegetable with already questionable health credentials and frying the hell out of it. Best case scenario you still get some trace amounts of potassium and assorted vitamins. Yes, the chicken in the chicken sandwich has also been fried to hell, but it’s chicken, and chicken is good. Eating the worst version of a good thing is better than eating the worst version of a not good thing. And Chick Fil A has to the good sense to throw two pickle slices on there, so it’s basically a salad. Sorry mom.

The real conflict arises during sauce selection. The key to any positive fast food experience will always be to keep those expectations hovering right around rock bottom. You’re paying five bucks for a thousand calories, honestly the expectation should simply be “this isn’t dog meat.” And even then, ignorance preserves virtue, ya know? So what I’m not doing is complaining, but what I am doing is saying that the fast food industry should’ve figured out barbecue sauce by now. Prioritizing the efficiency of both cost and process above all else will always lead to sacrifices in product quality, and I get that. Proper half pound pub burger patties become thin strips of wet carpet. Dry-rubbed and slow-cooked street taco carne asada becomes ground-up hopefullybeef. Fresh squeezed juice becomes a gallon of Mountain Dew Baja Blast. I get that. But sauce should be immune to any dropoff. And, for the most part, fast food sauces perform as they should. It doesn’t matter how many corners you cut, ketchup, yellow mustard, and mayo are always gonna be exactly what they are. The heat of buffalo sauce might vary place to place, but it’ll always taste like buffalo sauce.

Really, the sauce that suffers most is barbecue. Which isn’t even to say fast food barbecue sauce is bad, it’s just a huge missed opportunity. Great barbecue sauce is tangy and bright and apparently not realistic for the fast food industry to manufacture, so instead they serve smoky ketchup. Sickly sweet without any sort of bite or zest, it meets enough of the minimum requirements for your mouth to identify it as barbecue sauce and then dies on your tongue, leaving behind a menthol-like residue that’ll weaponize your breath for the next hour. It’s so far removed from legitimate barbecue sauce that the two shouldn’t share a name. Keep in mind I grew up in absolute barbecue nonfactor Aurora, Colorado, so this level of pretentiousness is unearned and probably offensive.

Even with an A+ barbecue sauce, though, it’s hard to see anything toppling the godly mixture of ranch and buffalo as my goto sandwich lather. Creamy, spicy, straightforward goodness that I’ve spent years training my body to crave.

And apologies again, really trying to keep this about the food, but Neighbor Steve is back! I think. His door is now locked, so he’s either back, or someone’s been tracking the total lack of activity at his house and decided to test out some of the amenities. Either way, I have a neighbor again. But unfortunately no sriracha tonight. It took everything I had not to knock, but I figure if Neighbor Steve is truly back, he might need a night to settle in before I passive aggressively compliment the health of his plants. The real tragedy of this whole ordeal is that I’ve been living in a world with unfettered access to free sriracha and am now forced to once again reckon with a gatekeeper. “Forced.”

I worry I’m stumbling toward an unfortunate convergence of self-awareness and normalization, where guilt is present and acknowledged, but so dulled by redundancy that it exists in name alone, unaccompanied by any actual symptoms of remorse. Guilt, or maybe something closer to shame, is the correct feeling, but at this point it’s toothless. External pushback is required, but Neighbor Steve is just too goddamn nice. And, I mean, we’re talking about two tablespoons of sriracha, so there’s a level of triviality that makes each individual request easy to stomach. Only when taken in aggregate does it seem unreasonable. So maybe this is just an exercise in controlling perspective? Anyway, this is the closest I’ve come to buying my own sriracha, which is some sort of progress.