I think if meat was a lot more expensive you'd have cuisine treating it the way much of the rest of the world treats it: a small part of a varied diet. I think you'd also see quality go up. It used to be this way: a steak was a luxury because it was expensive, and people ate it when they were feeling boss because it was fucking delicious. At this point I often grind steak up into hamburger because it's only marginally more expensive than hamburger and because I know that it's only one animal's worth of contamination. You don't even have to go back very far to see old Julia Child and Jaques Pepin cooking shows treating a piece of chicken or beef or pork with some reverence and arraying other ingredients around it. Now? Now we've got chicken fries. The protein has become so commoditized that we separate it entirely from the animal, render it into glue, add binders to it, extrude it, batter dip it and deep fry it to sell it hot at a price point commensurate with fucking potatoes. I am not a vegetarian. But I have a pretty strong conviction that if the externalities of industrial meat production were removed, the meat consumption in the western hemisphere would return to semi-sane levels... and if the externalities of meat production were properly taxed we'd see a renaissance of vegetarian options.
I haven't had them, but I did have, on a dare one time, a KFC Double Down, which is a bacon, cheese, and mayonnaise sandwich for which the bread has been replaced by two pieces of fried chicken. It is not as scientifically dubious as chicken fries, but every bit as offensive to humanity.
It might have been In Search Of, it might have been Burke's Connections. They were standing in the desert somewhere showing erosion control. When all you have is oil, they said, you use oil for a lot of things you wouldn't normally. Like erosion control. Dig it out of the ground and charge the Infidel $40 a barrel for it... or spray it on the dunes to keep them from moving. That, to me, is American cuisine. The Iranians (or Saudis, can't remember) would probably have killed for dandelions and the ability to keep them alive. But they had oil and nothing but oil so they kept the dust down by hosing it with crude. The British have us beat, I guess, but they're a country that told their proletariat to eat nothing but potatoes. The Double Down is an Irish Potato Famine of protein subsidy.
My path doesn't cross fast food very often. The kid's grampa likes to go to McDonald's so she'll go there with him (or did "before the sickness" as she puts it) and there's a Wendy's on the way home that has gotten maybe 3 orders out of us in 5 years. But if there were a Burger King in my sphere of influence, I probably would have also expected chicken strip in fry aspect ratio, and then I would have kicked myself for not recognizing it as a bizarre funnel cake mutation.