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I love eating out, and I think it's because of how I was brought up. I remember the first time I had fast food. My parents had invited some friends over to grill outside at our house. But the friends brought a bucket of KFC. I don't think you can imagine how wonderful this was. And how lucky I felt to be able to eat as much as I could. I had never had fried chicken. I don't know how old I was, probably somewhere around eight or nine. 

My family didn't eat out much. I am pretty sure that at that point we had been to Archie's Pizza once or twice. This was a small local pizza place on the south side of town. This was the side we lived on, although we were farther out, in the country. In my mind anyway, Archie's was the edge of town, it marked the boundary between civilization and wilderness. Also, every year at the 4th of July the place where my father worked (the Institute of Textile Technology) had a picnic at some county owned lake or something like that, where some of the guys grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. This was probably the limit of my experience of food outside of home, school cafeteria, and grandparents' house! There's nothing wrong with home cooking, but every meal?!

I still have a soft spot in my arteries for KFC.