In a country where superstitions are as imaginative as they are many, physicians have come to fear a jinx involving Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Thanat Tantinam, a colorectal surgeon in Thailand, knows a lot of things from his medical training, like the ins and outs of the human digestive system, or bowel cancer rates. But also: never eat Kentucky Fried Chicken at work.
Since he was a medical student, about a decade ago, the US fast food franchise has been the subject of an odd superstition among Thai doctors, many of whom believe that eating its chicken at work will lead to intolerably busy shifts.
“It’s a serious superstition in some hospitals,” said Thanat, 35. “Your colleagues might be mad if you bring KFC.”
He recently tested this theory. Between 2023 and 2024, he and several co-workers at Phatthalung Hospital in southern Thailand, his employer at the time, conducted a randomised control trial of 345 surgical shifts, comparing metrics like case load or estimated blood loss in patients from three groups of surgeons: a group that ate KFC, another that got food from a local brand named Five Star Chicken, and one that ate nothing.
The study, which was published this year in the Annals of Surgery Open, a medical journal based in Philadelphia, found that eating KFC does not, in fact, lead to more work. But it also left many questions unanswered: where did the KFC curse come from? And how had it gripped some of the most educated scientific minds in the country, including Thanat himself?
“Yes, I still believe it – maybe 80% out of 100,” he said. “If someone brought me KFC at work, I would keep it until past my shift.”
Such superstitions abound in Thailand, where Buddhism has blended with a melange of other spiritual traditions like animism, Hindu rituals and Chinese astrology to create a strong affinity for the supernatural in contemporary life.
“In Thailand, superstition isn’t the opposite of modernity – it lives comfortably alongside it,” said Theeranuch Pusaksrikit, a business school professor at Chulalongkorn University who researches how superstitions affect consumerist behaviour. “The same person can hold a science degree, consult an auspicious date before signing a contract and wear an amulet to work.”
‘This is not KFC’
No occasion is too big or too small for a sprinkle of superstition. There are the infamous black magic rituals that occasionally surface in politics, and popular customs like dressing in lucky colours corresponding to each day of the week. Last year, when a sinkhole opened up and stranded a pickup truck near Bangkok’s Vajira Hospital, Thanat’s current employer, people rushed to buy lottery tickets matching the vehicle’s licence plate number.
“Each hospital has their own superstition culture,” Thanat said. He has also heard of colleagues avoiding nuts, pizza or coffee while at work, and knows of at least one hospital where bananas – otherwise regarded as a lucky food – are taboo.
But few medical superstitions have been as universal and long-running as the KFC curse, a fact that has been a point of fascination at KFC itself.
“We dug into the data, it was pretty clear,” said Suhayl Limbada, who was until recently the chief marketing officer of KFC Thailand. “There was a noticeable trend at restaurants around hospitals, there was a dip in sales.”
Two years ago, he parlayed the curse into a marketing campaign. Though riffing on cultural practices had gotten Limbada in trouble before – the fried chicken-scented incense sticks the company released for Lunar New Year were widely panned – this one was much more warmly received.
Launched on doctor’s day in November 2024, the campaign offered a kind of cleansing ritual: chicken was sold in packaging labelled with slogans like “This is not KFC” in stores near hospitals.
Limbada has his own ideas about how the curse came to be. KFC opened in Thailand in 1984 and has since become one of the most ubiquitous fast food franchises in the country – and a trailblazer of late night delivery. It operates about 1300 stores, far outnumbering McDonald’s, which has about 240. In even the smallest rural town, chances are there is at least a KFC.
He thinks one of these rural locations might have been the ground zero, delivering one late night to an understaffed local hospital where a hungry doctor, unaware that they were about to be hit with a sanity-shattering deluge of patients, was waiting.
Building solidarity
The superstition has since racked up a catalogue of very specific lore.
It is widely understood, for example, that it only applies to departments that cannot easily leave the hospital for meals, like surgery or emergency rooms, said Titaporn Nasaarn, a 34-year-old ER doctor at Kamalasai Hospital in northeastern Thailand.
She recalled how her colleagues once successfully co-opted the superstition for good. It was during an unusually quiet evening in the surgical intensive care unit, and some of the nurses, who wanted to work, were worried they were going to lose their upcoming shifts.
“The attending anaesthesiologist performed a ritual to summon cases by ordering KFC and ordering pizza,” she said. The beds filled up. But “normally, hardly anyone dares to order it,” she added.
To everyone else, of course, KFC, with Thai spinoffs such as Green Curry Chicken Rice, remains a desirable food. And at many hospitals, patients or their families occasionally treat their medical caregivers to the stuff, a gesture that invariably puts Jaruda Mamuangbon, a 42-year-old nurse at Vajira Hospital, on edge.
But she and her colleagues have noticed that the number of KFC gifts has plummeted in the past two or so years.
“We have always graciously accepted the kind gift,” Jaruda said. “But I think the patients’ families have probably picked up on the superstition from social media.”
Theeranuch sees the widespread belief in the jinx not as a posture of anti-science, but a way for Thailand’s medical workers to keep their spirits up.
“Hospital work is intensely unpredictable, and a shared rule like ‘don’t eat KFC on shift’ may give staff a small sense of control over something inherently unpredictable,” she said. “They also build solidarity.”
Thanat has settled into a similar view. Underneath the supernatural dress of the KFC curse are, he said, more sobering earthbound realities.
It is telling that the curse has largely been confined to the country’s public hospitals, where doctors – overworked and underpaid compared with their private sector counterparts – have long called for better working conditions.
“If you work at a private hospital, you would want more patients to come,” Thanat said, adding that doctors’ compensation at private hospitals scales with greater caseloads.
“I think the KFC curse is a projection of fear,” he said. “We need a scapegoat.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Max Kim
Photographs by: Lauren DeCicca
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