disgusting food: chicken breast rings

mr. aw from breadxbread sent me this disgusting food picture:




(larger)

thanks aw!

while most of my disgusting food posts so far have focused on the historical culinary eras of rounded food and jelly meat, aw's photo shows how far we've come on the disgusting food front. new technology and increasingly strange consumer demand has led to all kinds of bizarre gastronomical combinations: chocolate breakfast corn dogs, jeff foxworthy-flavored jerky, oreo pizza . . . and these - chicken breast rings. the taste of breaded chicken, but in the form of an onion ring.

it's weird that we're still so fixated on round food. we'd rather eat a mechanically separated and reshaped chicken circle than the asymmetric intact meat. during the early years of widely-available, heavily-processed canned and preserved foods, people went for the (heavily-advertised) idea that processed and preserved foods were safer, easier, and potentially more nutritious and tasty, than the fresh ingredients. cold war technology had made real food, with its unpleasant connections to soil, bugs, labor, and the generally unsanitary outdoors, obsolete. here we are, decades later, and not too much has changed. at some point, people realized that canning and preserving food tended to suck out some of the mysterious vitamins and minerals that might keep us alive and happy. luckily, that is no longer a problem, as food companies have obliged us by adding in whatever health-item-of-the-month (currently omega-3s) is in fashion, so we can nibble our sustenance-circles in healthful contentment.