India, Aug. 8 -- What is the most consumed meat in India? If you answered mutton you would be wrong. More 'buffalo meat' is produced in India than mutton. But that isn't it either. The undisputed champion is chicken. We consume a staggering 5 million tonnes of it a year. So it will come as no surprise that KFC is among India's biggest non-pizza fast food chains, with over 1,100 stores, about 25% more than McDonald's and around double of Burger King. (Overall Domino's Pizza is still the king.) But here's the thing. KFC sales are falling in America. It's now a relatively minor player in the US fast-food market: only about 13% of its sales come from the US. Its real strength is in markets like India and especially China where, in many cities, there seems to be a KFC on every corner. Why? Well, one theory is that Americans are going off bone-in chicken. The other explanation for the decline came from the founder himself. Though Col Sanders sold the company in 1964, he continued to be the mascot (at a salary) until he died in 1980. But even then, he had no hesitation in stating how much quality had deteriorated. In 1976, he told The New York Times: "That's the worst fried chicken I've ever seen," adding, "there's no way anyone can get me to swallow those potatoes." KFC had other problems too. It was blindsided by the introduction of chicken nuggets by McDonald's, which noticed in the 1970s that Americans were eating less red meat, and decided to add chicken. Ray Kroc, the company's boss, hired a European chef called Rene Arend to create new dishes for the menu. Most of these (a chicken pot pie, a steak sandwich etc) never made it past the trial stage. Kroc then asked him to create fried onion nuggets as a side with the burgers. And Arend thought: Suppose I did the same thing, but with chicken? Everyone at McDonald's loved the taste of Arend's fried chicken nuggets, but McDonald's would need over a million nuggets if it was to roll out the product across stores. New technology was developed to do this. New technology was also created, using the principles of tempura batter, to make it seem like an industrial product had been recently battered at the store. In 1980, the McNuggets were launched. To everyone's surprise, McDonald's, best-known till then for its burgers, became the second-largest American fast food chain to sell chicken. (KFC was still number one.) The nuggets revolution transformed the fried chicken market in America and demonstrated that people liked fried food with a crispy batter and no bones. Once that was established all that remained was to translate that to sandwiches. Another chain, Popeyes, took on that challenge. Its success led to Chicken Sandwich battles among fast food operators. The sandwich war transformed the market and led to the soaring popularity of chicken burgers, to the extent that nearly 50% of all American restaurants now serve some form of fried chicken sandwich while the beef burger lags behind at 41%. It's a measure of KFC's growing irrelevance in America that it was not a major player in the sandwich wars. With the fried chicken market on its way down in the US, KFC has focused on Asia, where fried chicken has been as potent a symbol of Americana as the burger and the milk shake. Many Asian countries have their own fried chicken traditions but most exhibit an American influence. In Korea, fried chicken was popularised by American soldiers in the late 1950s. What we now call Korean Fried Chicken only became popular after 1982, when restaurateurs began putting thinner spicier coverings on the fried chicken. It is not an ancient Korean dish. In Japan, there is a clear American influence to Chicken Karaage. It took off after World War 2, when American Occupation forces urged the Japanese to eat more US wheat. While Karaage batter can be wheatless (potato starch etc) most commercial versions will use wheat in the batter. Where does that leave us Indians as lovers of chicken and saviours of KFC? At the edge of an ever-bigger fried chicken boom. We want to eat chicken all the time. And we delight in fried foods. Hopefully we won't just copy the West, and some bright chef will create an Indian version - as so many others in Asia have done - and take it around the world. So far there has only been one really delicious Indian fried chicken sandwich: The Rowdy Rooster in New York created by Chintan Pandya. If Chintan can do it so successfully in New York then surely chefs in India should be able to follow his lead?...