Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish containing chicken,
peanuts, and hot red peppers in a spicy pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers
call it laser chicken for two
reasons: It can zap you just like a laser, and the
sauce has a red color reminiscent of some laser beams. The dish has also
been called gunpowder chicken.
In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian
hackers have redesignated the common dish ‘lemon chicken’ as
Chernobyl Chicken. The name is
derived from the color of the sauce, which is considered bright enough to
glow in the dark (as, mythically, do some of the inhabitants of
Chernobyl).
