"Supposedly", it is offensive because it harken back to the days of both sharecropping (no time for lunch)and when blacks could not eat in restaurants. They packed fried chicken because it keeps well and still tastes good cold. I don't know. Rastus is supposed to be offensive too and I have never known blacks who longed for cream of wheat.
Well, it’s that, but it’s also that on long train and bus trips the blacks would pack chicken in brown paper bags... so I guess the stereotype is that for some people, of a certain generation, they remember a time when it seemed like you never saw an afro withOUT a drumstick in his hand.