When a New Delhi court ordered the closing of the city's first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet for health code violations last year, the American media viewed it as a cynical political ploy. After all, the action came just a year after the bubonic plague returned to India. If the country was going to worry about filthy restaurants, there were certainly people with dirtier hands than the Colonel.

But using a few flies and a high level of MSG to ban foreign fast food is not much different from using the spotted owl as a tool to save Oregon's old-growth forests: You take what the law will give you. And the fight against KFC has emerged as one of the principal battlegrounds in determining whether India's future will lie with the freewheeling global economy or the Gandhian tradition of low-level self-reliance.

As Vandana Shiva, the renowned Indian ecologist, points out in Food and Water Journal (Spring 1996), 'Doctors, health activists, farmers, environmentalists, and consumers are involved. Animal rights activists want to make sure we do not get a meat-based culture in this country. We are the leading vegetarian culture in the world. The movement in support of Indian culture and diversity is growing and multiplying. It is?.?.?. touching very deep cultural cords.'

Shiva's attack on the chain is in part an attack on factory farming in general--a mode of agriculture that's relatively new to India, where tiny holdings are still the rule, and where free-range chicken is a fact of life, not a yuppie trend. In Third World Resurgence (#67) she describes the 'concentration camp' conditions at these huge chicken plants, and the ways they can produce everything from foot troubles to 'caged layer fatigue.' She also warns of heavy use of antibiotics to prevent diseases in crowded conditions. Corporations like KFC are 'dumping a hazardous industry on the Indian consumer,' she contends. It may seem odd to see the ultraclean United States skewered as a purveyor of disease, but it's a charge that may grow more common as our consumer culture spreads to a growing global middle class.