Anachronyms
Quick, what does KFC stand for?
That's right, clearly they stand for nothing at all, because Colonel Sanders continues to perpetuate an unconscionable chicken genocide on the order of billions of deaths per year in an unflinchingly single-minded pursuit of corporate profits!1
But while I certainly love delivering Col. Sanders a burn more severe than battering him (in both senses), then dunking his head straight into a deep fryer, my goal today is not flaccid moral pontification—I have linguistic aims in mind.2
You see, in a purely technical sense, KFC doesn't stand for anything either: in 1991, the restaurant chain hitherto known as "Kentucky Fried Chicken" officially rebranded to "KFC."
This is known as an anachronym: a word that used to be an acronym,3 but now exists in its own right, without pointing to some other referent.
Except that isn't quite true either; it's probably more accurate to say that according to current "official" usage, you could almost call KFC an anacronym (without the "h"), but I have both semantic and orthographic bones to pick with that—no Sanders, get that damn wishbone out of my face!
First of all, the meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following for anacronym: "an acronym or initialism for which the expanded form is not widely known." Given that I rarely hear people talk about light-amplification-by-stimulated-emission-of-radiation pointers, or self-contained-underwater-breathing-apparatus diving, I think it's safe to count "laser" and "scuba" as examples. But going strictly by the OED definition, KFC is not an anacronym—barring an episode of mass amnesia, everyone knows what the expanded form used to be. Regardless, KFC fits the spirit of the word so perfectly, I couldn't imagine discounting it. Perhaps the definition could be amended to "…for which the expanded form is not widely known or officially used."
Secondly, I feel a compulsion to sneak an extra "h" into the spelling (making it anachronym, not anacronym). I am not alone in this wholesome habit; the enlightened editors of Network World also endorsed this spelling a mere… 14 years ago. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the beginning of acronym as the prefix acro-, meaning "highest, topmost, at the extremities" (emphasis mine); I suppose the letters of an acronym are indeed at the (frontal) extremity of their constituent words. Spelling it as anachronym destroys that semantic link, but I feel that is a worthy price to pay to instead bring in chrono-. The nod to Father Time is doubly appealing: usually it is his relentless march that leads to the expanded form being lost (it becomes an ana-chron-ism!), and it would settle an etymological matter. To the latter point, the Oxford English Dictionary thinks anacronym is "probably a blend of anachronism n. and acronym n.," but also mentions the possibility that the first syllable is the prefix an-, "hence with the meaning 'that is not an acronym'." Hogwash—this is all about anachronisms and acronyms; let's put them front and centre.
So there you have it: a neat word to begin with, and doubly so if you join my rebel alliance of anachronym-ists, with our corrected spelling and more inclusive definition. Since I'm rather taken with this as a corporate trend, let me offer you two other Canadian anachronyms: that behemoth of boxed mac-and-cheese products was known for decades as "Kraft Dinner" up north, but the suits cut it down to simply "KD" in 2015. Similarly, if you log in to the e-learning platform Brightspace, you're using a product from the software company "D2L." Once upon a time, however, that was "Desire2Learn"—I don't have a press release to prove this one, but the branded flip-flops I snagged during an internship there can attest to this important time in Canadian history.
Ah, to be an intern again… subsiding solely on the contents of the snack cupboard (filled with Kraft Dinner, not KD, thank you very much!); nabbing any swag that wasn't nailed down—those were the days.
In fact, if you're going to grant me anachronym, we might as well go all the way. Let's define an anarchonym (think anarchy) to be "an acronym or initialism in which the order of the letters does not match that of the expanded form." For instance, RABFU is an anarchonym: namely, it's a FUBAR "FUBAR." At this point we're only a stone's throw away from arachnonym, which I guess is just any name for a pet spider? Fine, fine, I'll leave it there for now, I promise…
A burn like that demands some kind of factual underpinning. Upon first writing that, my assumption was that all factory farms producing chickens are hellish abattoirs, designed simply to convert unadulterated misery into profit with maximum efficiency. I think perhaps this was informed by PETA's "Kentucky Fried Cruelty" campaign, which seems to date back to at least 2003; in particular, their undercover footage from a Tyson Foods slaughterhouse is heartbreaking. That being said, I was enthused to discover there are small rays of light beginning to pierce this bleak landscape.
The Better Chicken Commitment (BCC) outlines a set of policies for the more humane treatment of chickens in the food industry;4 over the past few years a number of big names have pledged to meet these standards. World Animal Protection tracks companies' progress towards these targets in their annual report, The Pecking Order (yes, really). The 2021 edition is a mixed bucket for KFC: according to the report, most national operations follow Yum! Brands' global animal welfare policy (note the general lack of hard targets…), which "explicitly covers chicken welfare, but is not aligned with the BCC;" those countries (including the US) score abysmally (typically 5 out of 90 points). However, some of the European operations fare much better. KFC UK & Ireland is the star among them, achieving the top rank of "Tier 1 - Leading" after earning the full 30 marks for "corporate commitments" as well as "objectives and targets," and a further 23/30 on "performance reporting." They earned points in that latter category for their annual chicken welfare report. Those reports are fascinating, but you'd be forgiven for not finding them—at time of writing, any request I make to www.kfc.co.uk is being denied (403 Forbidden). As usual, the Wayback Machine comes to the rescue; here's the 2021 edition (see also the 2020 edition, which has a very helpful high-level diagram of the supply chain).
Let's be clear: this is not enough. According to KFC's own report, several metrics worsened in 2020—e.g., mortality hitting its highest recorded level (4.37%, up from 4.00% in 2019), a lower percentage of high welfare breeds were in use (1.73%, down from 2.65%—if I'm reading the BCC correctly, they've pledged to get this to 100% by 2026‽), and a bump in executions by electric water bath (generally considered to be less humane than "controlled atmosphere stunning" (CAS); CAS accounted for 62% of deaths in 2019, but only 57% in 2020). It seems we're also still in the (probably unavoidable) "cheap talk" stage of the BCC: earning the full 30 marks for "corporate commitments" is nice, but at some point you do actually have to make things better. (What's more, all of this already assumes that the best option—just not eating the chickens in the first place—is not even on the table.)
However, viciously criticizing KFC UK & Ireland using the welfare data they willingly publish would be tantamount to drunkenly stumbling under the streetlight. Assuming this data is being reported accurately,5 KFC UK & Ireland is providing a level of transparency far beyond any of their competitors; while these staid corporate charts belie an ocean of suffering, they are also an invaluable tool in alleviating that suffering. What we can measure, we can improve; while we must remain mindful of Goodhart's Law, I remain confident that a solid empirical grounding provides our best chance at effecting meaningful change.
So while I still feel justified in my snarky barb, KFC UK & Ireland earns my kudos as well. Once again, this isn't enough, but it is a commendable start—and that deserves to be recognized.
Well, perhaps had is more accurate; the chicken welfare digression ended up overwhelming the rest.
Yes, yes, KFC was an initialism, not an acronym; gold star for you; it's now an anachronym all the same.
Yes, this is a footnote for a footnote, and yes obviously it isn't typeset correctly; I'm not happy about it either. More to the point, I find it curious that the Better Chicken Commitment website offers no information on the history of the project—when it started, who the original sponsors were, etc. It's only from a PDF copy of a letter at the bottom of their policy page that we find a date (November 2019), and a list of signatories (The Humane League, Animal Equality, The Humane Society of the United States, Mercy for Animals, World Animal Protection, Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals, Humane Society International Canada, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Compassion in World Farming, and Four Paws). I'm also surprised that while (version two) of the BCC lays out conditions on stocking density, floor covering, "functional enrichments," acceptable slaughter methods, and more, there's no mention of debeaking. Per Wikipedia, some European countries have begun to outlaw debeaking and "analysts expect the practice to be gradually banned across the continent"—to me, that suggests there must be some anti-debeaking momentum; its absence from the BCC strikes me as slightly unusual. (This might just be my own ignorance on display; I am not a subject matter expert here, and may be overlooking an obvious explanation.)
I don't have much direct evidence that would lead me to doubt this, but I'm starting from a place of vague general distrust born of reading one too many "oops, giant multinational did a greenwashing!" articles. In that vein, see this video from VFC Foods, which claims that some of KFC's "Behind the Bucket" marketing is at best puffery, and potentially downright misleading. I do think the report figures are more likely to be accurate than KFC's marketing, and it's worth noting that VFC does offer a competing vegan product, but still… this doesn't improve my perception of KFC.