Will A KFC Firelog Make Your House Smell Like Fried Chicken?

If you've ever had a stuffy nose, you know how important your sense of smell is to your sense of taste. You can be eating the most delicious food in the world, but if you can't smell a lick then it'll all just taste like underseasoned Styrofoam. In theory, scent should be able to satiate. One time I tried to make healthy Taco Bell by putting a Cheesy Gordita Crunch into a paper bag and huffing it while I ate a bag of baby carrots. In the end I caved and ended up eating the Cheesy Gordita Crunch, but I also ate, like, nine baby carrots, so the experiment worked.

Though KFC was not aware of my brilliant discoveries in biohacking, its promo team still sent me the KFC 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog, a fried-chicken-scented log for my own personal enjoyment. This was tremendously exciting to me, as I enjoy fried chicken almost as much as I enjoy setting things on fire. I put the log into my outdoor firepit. My husband and I both sat two feet from the fire so we could enjoy maximum fried chicken aroma. We also hoped that it would make our clothes smell like 11 herbs and spices for a day or two.

Sadly, our log smelled like nothing. Not fried chicken, not wood, not burning paper or even chemicals. It's made by Enviro-Log, a low-emissions firelog alternative, which could explain the underwhelming experience. I got my face well up over that pit so the smoke could go straight up into my nostrils and might have singed off a little bit of my hair, but I was glad to do it because I am a professional journalist and people are depending on me to inform them whether or not they should be spending good money on a fried chicken firelog. And to those people I say: "No. If you want your fire to smell like fried chicken, then buy a bucket of fried chicken and throw it in the pit. Or just eat some damn fried chicken and make a boring ol' regular fire."