Actually, there is a sort of precedent for this. In Japanese cooking, there’s a thing called “donburi” which is basically a bowl of rice with stuff on top of it. One of the better-known ones is “oya-ko donburi” which has chicken and egg on top of it (“oya” is parent; “ko” is child, so you get the idea). I don’t go in for this sort of thing myself, but I can see where it came from.
What, never had disco fries?
Exactly, every fool knows the cheese goes on first to keep the gravy from making the fries soggy!
Savages, hell even Canadians know how to do it right!
CMC fnord!
The precedent for this is an 10 year old kid stuffing everything on his Thanksgiving plate into his gluttonous face at once, and then asking for cheese to wash it down.
The other precedent would be something like a pizza hut pizza where they lay down a crust, cover it with cheese, put another crust on top of it with cheese stuffed into the rim, and then top it off with meat and cheese.
It’s a marriage of “food production” and “food marketing” and has very little to do with “food”. Years ago it would have concerned me that this bowl of gravy and cheese didn’t cause mass revulsion. Now, I’m just used to it.
Exactly what I thought, Dio. I was only half listening the first time it came on and I wondered why there was a commercial parody on during House or whatever, but hearing the chick say something like " now I guess you’ll want me to pour cheese all over it" made me think there was no way it *couldn’t * be a joke. When I realized it was a real thing, the first thought that came to mind was “that sounds like MPSIMS for sure”. But, being Picky McFinicky, I didn’t know if it was something everyone else thought was a great idea, and I didn’t want to get pummeled for my weird food ways. It’s not the unhealthiness of it that grosses me out; it’s everything about it.
It reminds me of something I would put together from leftovers at 2:00am when I stumbled into the kitchen after the bars close.
I can certainly understand why some people think this is the most horrible thing ever.
However, I am not a “Picky McFinicky”. I’ll have to go try this myself. 
PS – Let me tell you about my “ultimate breakfast” sometime …
Now, now…you’re just feeling a mite dyspeptic. Maybe it’s from that stick up your ass. The dish in question doesn’t sound appealing to me either, but I think you may be overdoing it a bit by citing it as a symptom of All That Is Wrong In The World.
As others have mentioned in this thread, there are (and always have been) people who will stir everything on their plate together before eating it. So, I’m not quite clear on how long ago you mean by “years ago.”
Ahhh, but what is ‘three cheese blend’? Which three cheeses, precisely? Kind of yellowish-white cheese, kind of orange-ish cheese and something else. Something terrible that cannot be named, I think. KFC now scares me almost as much as the Burger King.
Yeah, I’m not seeing this as particularly symptomatic of Teh Downfall Of Society!!!1!one! but by the same token, isn’t there something a bit disturbing about the idea of “The Big Bowl o’ Fat ‘n’ Starch”? It’s a bit disturbing to me that this sort of thing would be released and apparently is quite popular, especially given the nutrition info cited above. I mean, I eat like crap and that thing still sounds pretty nasty to me.
Great post, King of Soup.
People, I think, are hard-wired to like fat and carbohydrate. In the past couple of months, I’ve been spending a lot of time with recent immigrants to the US. The food where they came from is “very simple” and involved a lot of fresh produce that they raised in gardens or bought daily. Meat was on the menu maybe twice a week. To a one, they love “big bowl o’ fat n’ starch” type stuff. My girlfriend, for example, would eat pizza at every meal if I served it. Chocolate, ice cream, pastries, bacon, french fries…you name the “junk” food and they LOVE it.
Further, when I was an undergrad back in the early 80’s, one of my very best friends was a fellow who came here to study from Japan. He said he was staying here specifically for the food and didn’t care if he never saw another bowl of rice, soba noodle, or piece of raw fish again. As far as he was concerned, the Pizza Hut Meat Lover’s Pizza was the pinnacle of foodstuffs, he also loved Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Roy Rogers Double-R burgers.
Later on, when I lived in Laredo TX, an area that was about 97% Hispanic in those days, corn tortillas were disdained as something that only poor people ate. White flour tortillas made with lard, now that was eating!
So anyway, the Big Bowl O’ Stuff doesn’t appeal to me personally, mainly because of the corn and cheese, but I can see where it does have a visceral appeal to some people. Gluttony is nothing new, either. Religious leaders and philosophers have railed against it for millenia.
I mean my own personal “years ago”. As in. . .the days before my revulsion tolerance had been shifted by monstrosities like Carl’s Jr. 1lb Six Dollar Burger, and pizza with cheese injected into the crust.
I don’t have a problem with KFC meeting a desire. If they noticed lots of people ordering their mashed potatoes, carn, gravy, and chicken, and mixing it all together, and coming to the counter and asking, “do you have any cheese I could put on this?” Fine.
“Finally. They put it all together in a bowl for me!!”
But, you really get the feeling that it’s more like, “oh, well. I’m already tired of the Double Whopper. What’s the latest thing that the marketers have ejaculated into my subconcious?”
There’s a virtual infinity of food out there, and people are excited because a fucking fast food employee looked in the garbage one day and thought, “I bet we could put that in a bowl and sell it to people.” Excuse me for being a little disgusted by it.
I must contradict whoever it was who said that cheese and gravy don’t go together. Cheese, gravy, and potatoes are a divine combination.
You don’t really see this as significantly analogous, do you? That’s like saying comparing an equestrian show with a monster truck rally.
A typical Oyako “Bento Bowl” is, let’s see… a serving of rice, topped with, um… two or three ounces of thinly sliced chicken, one shiitake, a very small amount of onion, two snow peas, and one green onion stalk, all finely prepared and together with one beaten egg.
As far as the analogy goes is that there are several ingredients together – which can be said about just about anything.
Oyako donburi is an ascetic lunch compared with run-of-the-mill North American lunch offerings – but next to this savoury starch and saturated fat sampler, it’s penitent’s fare.
Maybe if Bento places offered a huge beefbowl with a sloppy mix of yakisoba, daikon, mizutaki, tempura prawns, and lard, it might be considered a precedent.
As it stands, though, it’s like saying that the Lost Weekend has its precedent in Sunday Communion.
WTF?
I’m sure it’s delicious, but I have a really hard time paying full price for leftovers that are bad for me. I can do this at home! It’s called “only one tupperware and four dishes to save”.
Really, though. I’m sure 95% of everybody here bitchin’ about the unhealthieness and horror of the “NEW Famous Bowl!” has had Fried Chicken, Mashed Potatoes and Gravy, Corn, and maybe a side salad, appetizer, or corn bread with cheese in it in equal or larger quantities as found in this Bowl (Excepting that it was all served in individual portions). The world didn’t end and you probably thought it was a fairly square and satisfying meal.
The messing doesn’t add any more calories or fat to it. It may seem less civilized somehow, but that’s all aesthetics.
I’m sure the Famous Bowl idea is directly correlated to the sucess of Taco Bell’s Chicken Bowls from a year or so back (Which, by the way, was REALLY TASTY.) KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell are, after all, under the umbrella of the same company (YUM!) and probably have some wonkaesque, oompaloompified, high tech, R&D division built deep into the side of some Kentucky Mountain. It’s their new secret formula- I can see some guy holding up a blueprint of a bowl and imploring, “…you know, for kids.”
I see Long John Silver’s is also part of this Fast Food Juggernaut. I’ll tell ya, if they can make a shrimp gumbo bowl, with rice, a couple of Hushpuppies and a scoop of those little Batter Cracklins (aka, Cod Crack) sprinkled on top, I would try one.
First, don’t talk shit on monster truck rallies. They’re loud, destructive, and have beer. Far more fun than watching some shitting horses jump over hedges.
Secondly, I’m guessing that if you check into the caloric values by serving, the KFC Bowl O’ Stuff comes in close to the Japanese Bowl O’ Stuff. Your infatuation with the differing presentation, I think, is the main difference.
THIS. Is precious.
Hilarious!
Heeheeheeheehee…
Sure, starch and fat are delicious! It ain’t just us first-worlders who like it - we’re just the only ones who have the luxury to eat as much as we want of it.
Still, as much as I like unhealthy food, the thought of eating a bucket of mashed potatoes, fried chicken, gravy, and cheese is simply too much. It makes me feel a bit queasy to imagine. I don’t question the idea that starch and fat are just naturally tasty - but this is about two steps short of stirring Crisco into cornstarch. Food that’s as heavy and greasy as this just does not appeal to me at all - and I can put away pizza and ice cream with no trouble.
Seriously?! I had no idea. I really don’t like flour tortillas at all - they don’t taste like anything. I always figured those were pretty much gringos-only food.
Yeah, it is all aesthetics. It’s sort of irrational, I don’t disagree. But whoever compared it to eating out of a trough was right - that’s about what this seems like to me.
It’s just that this doesn’t seem like a real dish. I get that fast food at any restaurant is unhealthy. I get that a taco salad might have just as many calories. But this is just “let’s toss it all in a bowl and call it something new”. It does disturb me aesthetically. What’s wrong with that?