Two Legs in a Bucket

It still comes back.

Months later, out of nowhere, a picture flashes up in my head, sharp as a photo, and for a second I’m standing in that alley again.

I should tell you right away: nobody got hurt.

Well. Almost nobody.

Every travel blog says it. Every hostel bar. Every guy with a surfboard and an opinion.

Eat like the locals.

So I did.

A small village in Bali. Coworking space by day. Golden hour on the walk home. Dinner at the same local warung every evening, same table, roughly the same order.

My routine. My safe little world.

That evening I’m late. Golden hour is over, and the alley I pass on the way to dinner has almost no light left.

I nearly walk past.

Then I see him.

A man squats low on the ground, heels flat, in the position locals can hold for an hour and I can hold for eleven seconds. Water everywhere. A floor that has clearly seen things. In front of him, two buckets.

Out of one, two legs stick straight up.

He’s scrubbing. Hard.

I stop.

Chicken legs.

Obviously.

My brain gets there in half a second. My stomach takes the scenic route.

A few meters further, and I mean a few meters, is my warung. The one with my table.

I knew this is how it’s done here. Nobody had lied to me. Nobody had hidden anything. And still, something in me flips.

Was it seeing it at all? Or was it the floor?

I still don’t know.

My head offers two versions. Both feel true.

Version one: this is the real thing. Done like this for generations. Eat like the locals.

Version two: this is how you spend tomorrow within three meters of a bathroom.

Same chicken. Same bucket. Same alley. Two completely different products.

“Eat like the locals” might be the best brand line in tourism, and nobody owns it. It takes everything that would get a restaurant shut down at home (no kitchen, no gloves, no stainless steel) and turns it into proof. The floor? Authentic. The bucket? Authentic. The dark alley? Extremely authentic.

Flip the frame, and the same evidence testifies for the prosecution. The floor? Hygiene violation. The bucket? Exhibit A. The dark alley? Ambulance.

Nothing about the chicken changed between those two paragraphs. Only the story around it did.

Which makes this a branding problem in a food costume.

Most people think branding is the stuff you make: the logo, the sign, the packaging, the nice photo of the bowl.

The man in the alley has none of that. He has a brand anyway. He just isn’t the one building it. It gets built in the head of whoever walks past, out of everything they already believe about travel, “real” food, dirt, and safety.

He shows. You decide what it means.

Restaurants know this. That’s why open kitchens exist. They pay architects to let you watch, and it pays off: researchers from Harvard and UCL found that when cooks and customers could see each other, customers rated the food’s quality more than 20 percent higher.

But an open kitchen comes with a frame. Stainless steel, good lighting, a chef in a white jacket.

The alley comes with a drain.

At home, chicken arrives as a pale breast on a white tray under plastic, without a single leg in sight. That’s branding too. Very good branding. Its whole job is to make sure you never have the thought I had in that alley.

Paul Rozin spent decades studying disgust at the University of Pennsylvania. One of his best-known experiments goes like this: drop a sterilized dead cockroach into a glass of juice, stir, fish it out. The roach is cleaner than your fork. Most people still won’t drink the juice.

Together with April Fallon, he argued that almost everything we find disgusting is of animal origin, and that disgust runs on contamination: one brief touch can make perfectly good food inedible.

Two legs in a bucket on a dirty floor. Animal, plus contamination. The exact combination disgust was built for.

So maybe the answer to my question is: both.

And the picture comes back. Maybe the ick is right. Disgust doesn’t argue. It just decides.

Rozin also tested small children. His team offered them fake dog poop made of peanut butter and stinky cheese. Plenty of the youngest ate it. Older kids wouldn’t go near it.

We aren’t born disgusted. Rozin and Fallon believe disgust develops over roughly the first eight years of life, and we pick up its objects from the people around us. Rozin even thinks enough exposure can wear it down. He has spent years arguing that Americans should eat insects.

So disgust is learned. Which means it’s cultural. Which means it’s a frame.

Transparency without a frame is just exposure. The same bucket can say “craft” or “contamination.” What decides is the story the viewer brought along, or the one you gave them first.

If the frame isn’t there before the ick, the ick wins. If it is, you get dinner.

Brands don’t create meaning from nothing. They choose which possible meaning wins.

***

I kept eating at that warung. Every evening. For weeks. A few meters from the alley.

The chicken never changed. Only my story about it did.

The ick lost. The picture stayed. Sometimes it still flashes up, usually right as the food arrives.

Perspective is the brand.

Enjoy your dinner.