I'm making this a food related writing post now for no good reason https://thetakeout.com/a-v-club-taste-test-special-the-bowl-at-the-howling-r-1798213108
I don't know what a poke bowl is but the idea of being fed KFC in a manner not unlike just giving your dog a bunch of their shit in a doggy dish seems like the product of LSD being put in the Yum Brands water supply one day. Oswalt is a foodie. Maybe he likes those things. I am not. I guess I just liked his take on what seems to me like leftover garbage tossed in a plastic tray and sold as food. It's their best seller by the way which I never would have expected when I read his rant after it came out
Poke is a Hawaiian famous bowl. You take raw fish, throw it in with rice, wasabi and veggies and call it a meal. It's like you went I was going to make sushi, but I hate myself too much to try so here's a bunch of shit in a bowl. The difference is #poke has 1.2m instagram posts, while #famousbowl has 6,000. Full disclosure: I hate both, and can readily acknowledge that poke has a million percent less frying and saturated fat. But nobody corrects anyone else's pronunciation of "famous bowl". Really the only knock on the bowl from an industry perspective is that it's hard to eat while driving, which is usually death for fast food. According to Lyon, 70 to 80 percent of sales come through the drive-thru, which means convenience and portability are often paramount in the design of fast foodstuffs. The bowl, unlike chicken nuggets or a cheeseburger, is fundamentally challenging to consume because it requires not one but two hands: one to operate the spoon, and another to keep the container from falling off your leg and emptying its payload onto your shoes. https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a17984/patton-oswalt-sadness-bowl/ Also full disclosure: I love that Patton Oswalt bit. Always have. Am not a fan of KFC. Never have been. But the rank hypocrisy of foodie culture bugs the shit out of me. These are people that will happily eat gray steak if it's prepared sous vide but will happily deride medium rare steak if it's sat on a steam table for 45 minutes. The only difference is with sous vide, you had to plasticwrap it in a garbage bag before you ate it.Well, for one thing, Oswalt's "wet mound of starch" is actually considered a healthier option in the fast food industry. Coming as it does in a small tub of finite capacity, the bowl helps control portion size and reduce calorie consumption. "Bowls are often offered as an alternative to a core item, a la a naked burrito," which offers "the same ingredients without the calories of a tortilla," explains Conrad Lyon, Senior Equity Analyst at the investment bank and research firm B. Riley & Co. The Famous Bowl, for instance, comes in at a mere 680 calories compared to the 1,150 calories you'd consume if you ate four pieces of chicken, a serving of mashed potatoes, and a biscuit.