I just now found what I know without a shadow of a doubt to be a chicken brain in my 10 year old son's KFC meal. I have not eaten there in ages, but my kids got a craving for fried chicken, so we ordered a 7pc. meal. In the middle of eating it, my son jumped up from the table, freaking out about something being in his chicken. Upon looking closely at what he was pointing at, I couldn't believe it - it was most definately a brain. It really doesn't look like the picture submitted here - what I'm looking at has the tell tale signs of a brain - about the size of a pecan - grayish in color, and with the zig-zag lines of a brain - it also has some sort of stem coming out of the bottom of it. I tried taking a picture, but my camera wouldn't get a good close-up shot. I'll try uploading the picture I have - it's hard to tell from the picture, but there is no doubt that it is a brain. I'm so grossed out. I will never eat at KFC again and I'm regretting that we ever did in the first place. I want my money back, to say the least. Ugh.

Thanks for the news.
I will take this photo on my mobile.
So that I wont eat fastfood again.
Help me to lose weight
Hahahahahas :)

lol dude thats not brains of a chicken, I'm a cook at Kfc and I have been for abuot 2 years now. It looks like to me that its a thigh piece of meat. When cooking thighs you have to break the hip bone outta place. The raw piece of meat that you see looks like skin that didnt get cooked all the way. this happens alot in pressure cookers that we use in Kfc for orignal chicken. If anyone who worked at a Kfc currently or ever has, they would say the same thing. It just looks like its under cooked meat. Getting chicken that is under cooked is very comman at Kfc because of the time it takes to drop chicken in the fryers and its demand by customers.

I just ate KFC tonight and found the same organ in my food. I actually think it is a lung. You can notice the bronchial tubes leading to the organ and some of the ribs surrounding the lung.

And no, it couldn't be the brains. Chicken heads come off very early in the slaughter process, are not split open, and even if by Act of God a head split open and the brain found its way to the thigh, there is not a chance it would stay there through the rinsing, chilling and 9pc cutting.

If a person pays for a bucket of deep fried chicken muscles, they should not have to hope that the bucket doesnt contain some other part of the animal.

Next time you get a salad, should you have to worry that there are poison ivy leaves in it? Thats a leaf too, right? If you cant deal with eating all kinds of leaves, you shouldnt eat any at all.

(by some peoples logic at least)

I handled raw chicken wings yesterday for dinner..that isn't raw chicken wing. That's something entirely different.

@bluesunburn:

I would also like to add The "T" in a T-bone steak is a vertebra from the animal's spinal column and as such main contain a section of the actual spinal cord. Other potentially contaminated cuts include porterhouse,standing rib roast,prime rib with bone,bone in rib steak and chuck blade roast with loin. These cuts may include spinal cord tissue and or so called dorsal root ganglia,swelling of the nerve roots coming into the meat from the spinal cord which has been proven to be infectious.

Spinal cord contamination is probably most abundant in ground beef products:hot dogs, hamburgers, meat based pizza toppings and taco fillings.

Chicken brain is white in color and it is not attached to the thigh.

In response to narcolepticdoc, who makes the claim that this is "likely visceral organ meat" i'm sure most readers will be infinitely relieved when they realize they're eating a colon or a liver as opposed to the brain. Inject sanity? Perhaps standards is a better goal.

@Fatal616:

You get CJD from eating brains. Severely undercooked brains that are infected with a specific prion, to be precise.
Infection rates are insanely rare (according to Wikipedia, the infection rate rate is somewhere around one case per million people per year), but it sounds sexy for news people to say "Mad Cow!" at the tops of their lungs and incite panic.

If we weren't meant to eat meat, we wouldn't have canines or incisors. :-)

Hnh. No biggie. I love organ meats, myself. Barbequed chicken intestins go for a quarter a stick in Thailand, and make great munching between bars! But I prefer the hearts myself! :-)

@ amiga_500
Thanks, dude! That's my favorite part of the thigh! I always thought it was a little bit of the liver! Now, where can I get a bucket of chicken kidneys? :-)

Hasn't anyone ever seen a raw chicken wing before? That's all that looks like.

I have to say - Consumerist, you're definitely help me curb my fast food habits, one chain at a time!

@Pipes: Pics or it didn't happen. Also, where was this?

And nothing freaks me out more than maggots. I just can't eat the stuff now. Thanks for the reminder!

Which is why I'm a breast man.

I too think it's just small intestine...but what part of the chicken was he eating?

Well, at least it IS chicken. It could have been ethylene glycol from China. Or the straps from a Walmart flip-flop that would give you a "chemical burn"

I love to eat "natural casing" hot dogs and sausages (intestines) and I've eaten pig's intestine straight. But I feel like puking now

Good point, but back on topic... That shit is just disgusting... Popeye's it is!

Yeah, that's pretty disgusting! I gagged when I saw it.

He should be grateful. The brain is probably the only part of the chicken that hasn't been smeared for months with the feces of its owner's compatriots.

I'm no chicken anatomy expert, but I've eaten my share of variety meats and I don't think it's small intestine. Intestines are muscle tissue and that mystery part is too soft and textureless to be muscle. It seems like a bundle of blood vessels or nerves or something.

muscle, skin, brain....it doesn't matter its all from a dead animal.
It annoys me when western omnivores think its gross when omnivores in other parts of the world eat brains, frogs, turtles, cats, dogs, horses.….its all relative.

Hmm...I wonder if this will stop me from eating KFC.

I think The Colonel's face says it all.

This is kind of crap is below the consumerist. This obviously is just some wussy child that is afraid of food and has never had fried chicken before. Even worse then the fool that thinks it was brains, is this website for putting forward this as fact.

I can imagine the complainer has never cooked thier own food. I can also assume prior to this it was only chicken fingers and McNuggets.

Disgusting that people freak out about this.

I have to add into this discussion. While the people who have brought some sanity into this discussion are mostly right, that piece is not intestine but kidney. The way KFC separates the pieces the backbone is generally partly attached. The kidneys sit on either side of the backbone by the leg/thigh. I think the problem is most of us are used to seing our food sanitized, and in the case of chicken, skinless and boneless.

I usually see that part on the thighs from KFC, my dog loves it!

You bastards.

[www.hormel.com]

"The kidneys are on the interior, running along either side of the backbone, near the tail. They are about 1 to 2 inches long, and roughly the diameter of a pencil. They are somewhat rough and bumpy rather than smooth. Bright red when raw, they cook to a brownish gray. They have to be "dug out" of their veterbral nest with the tip of the little finger or a chopstick."

I've once had a (kosher!) fried chicken squirt blood on me. (For those who don't know, it means it wasn't really kosher, because kosher food is salted to death to get the blood out).

Still, yuck.

Gotta echo a few other posters here: nevermind the brain/pancreas/skin/intestines, or whatever it is, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SOYLENT GREEN SHIT NEXT TO IT?!?! YUCKA!

I think that is the guts. The trail endings are cosidered very good. You ever eat the the guts behind the thigh quarter of a KFC fried chicken? They are very tasty. Just eat it.

Looks like organ meat. My guess is the pancreas.

And why is everyone making such a big deal out of THAT. I'm more disgusted by how much that piece of chicken is glistening from the sheer amounts of grease. ughh

Thanks for making everyone vegetarian for a little while, consumerist.

If it is some other animal's brain then... oh god, I don't even want to think about that.

@Eilonwynn: I can hang with the brain and or skin...I have eaten worse but WTF is that greenish stuff near the bone?

Looks like a lump of skin and fat to me. Chicken skin puckers like that.

I don't see what's so gross about these pictures anyway. Is this one of those "I can't eat meat that looks like it came from an animal" things? Meat is animal corpse parts -- if you can't deal, don't eat it.

@narcolepticdoc: I hear ya.

Course, in looking at the picture, I can't tell you what I am more disgusted with. The entire subject matter looks awful, not just the brainy part.

1. Chickens don't have brains in their THIGHS.

2. Chickens have brains in their skulls, like most creatures.

3. Chicken brains are... um... how shall we say this in a manner so as not to offend any chickens out there.... um... Not Very Big At All.

Most likely this was some kind of visceral organ meat.

It's a chicken liver - not a brain. They are often found in thigh meat. This one doesn't look like it's cooked (which I admit is gross), but it's not brains.

i'm going to barf.

and never eat kfc again. ever.

Not to mention, this guy just bought a bucket of artery-clogging nastiness and he's complaining about brains. Brains are arguably much better for you than the deep-fried animal skin he was about to feast upon.

What weird lines we draw in this country. We'll eat animal muscle and skin deep-fried in animal fat but God forbid we eat brains.

Um, so? People eat animal brains all the time. Nothing wrong with that.

You've made atleast one person physically sick with those images...me

I just ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken today. I really, really didn't need to see that.