It's no secret that PETA is no friend of KFC's. And now, the fried chicken purveyor has angered the people at Greenpeace, too. The organization has recently alleged that The Colonel has been using wood harvested from Indonesia's rain forest for the paper in its signature chicken buckets. Along with all the other issues associated with deforestation, Indonesia's forests are the habitat of the endangered Sumatran tiger.
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In a bit of CSI-like sleuthing, the environmental group has reportedly found that the packaging KFC uses in Indonesia, the U.K., and China for the past two years have fibers that came from tropical hardwood trees native to Indonesia's rain forests. More than half of the material in KFC's China stores came from the same kinds of wood, Greenpeace claims.
Update!: A Yum! Brands spokesperson who read this post has e-mailed in to add this comment:
“The fact is that 60% of paper products we purchase are sourced from sustainable forests, and suppliers are moving toward 100%.”
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.