A Cultural History of the Chicken

"The symbolic and folkloric life of the chicken is much more varied and vivid than the one pursued in real life by the average bird," writes Matthew Sweet in The Independent. "Anxieties about what might really lie beneath the crust of the Chicken McNugget have sent all kinds of seductive but groundless rumours crackling around the world. The untrue story about the old couple who found a battered rat at the bottom of their KFC bucket was first recorded in 1976, but the volume of this body of myth has increased substantially with the growth of the Internet."  E.g., The McPus Sandwich, KFC's Mutant Organism, Chicken McNoggin.