Food Theory: Do NOT Eat NyQuil Chicken!
This year, The Food and Drug Administration issued an urgent message to the parents of America warning of “a recent social media video challenge” that “encourages people to cook chicken in NyQuil.”
The FDA said you should talk to your children about how important it is to not cook with with over-the-counter medicines. But I advise parents to not worry about this at all. Make sure your child is keeping up with their homework instead.
Here’s why: There was no “social media challenge” involving NyQuil chicken. There were a few TikTok accounts that reacted to an old 4Chan video of someone boiling a chicken in NyQuil to be funny/weird. All the reactions were, basically, “gross!” and not “you should try this.” But even those videos are gone from TikTok now (you can look find them on Twitter, though.)
Even if there was a “challenge,” very few people would go to the trouble of cooking a chicken in NyQuil, and I can’t imagine anyone eating one. It would taste and smell absolutely foul.
In warning about a trend that wasn’t happening, the FDA created a trend. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of news organizations reported on it, most accepting the FDA’s bogus framing that it’s a “challenge” people are actively participating in, and countless people were searching the term. Check out Google Trends. That big spike on the right is when the FDA issued its warning. The big spike on the left is the last time this hoax trended.
