Finger lickin' good

Sometimes I don't eat lunch until late afternoon, and then hunger starts really suddenly. Usually this kind of hunger craves something western, because much as I love Japanese food, it's too refined to fulfil such a brutal flesh-eating desire. So I usually go to KFC. Where they serve Japanese-sized portions. Today, as usual I was given a Chicken Fillet Burger the size of a medium-sized grapefruit - but more importantly I was given a bag of fries containing a mere 10 fries. Yes, I counted. A mere ten full-size fries and 3 more runty ones that don't count. KFC may do fat fries, unlike McDonald's thin ones, but I'm sorry, being able to count the number of fries with the fingers you have on both hands represents one simple fact: there are not enough.

This is down from 15 full-size fries the last time. Is this for convenience? Fast food used to be about time: serving you the food fast; but maybe now it's about quantity: giving you so little that you are not burdened with the inconvenience of having to eat very much. You can part with your money and be out of there in no time.

In America I had to order the smallest size of any popcorn, coffee, anything because this would still provide me with something that would be regarded as large-size back in England. Here I have to do the opposite and order everything large to get a medium size by British standards. I went to the cinema with Tom a few weeks ago and made the mistake of buying a small-size popcorn (£2). There was so little popcorn in the box that until Tom picked it up he actually thought it was empty.