The Yanks are at it again: Americans are making “sleepy chicken” with NyQuil
Words: Shamim de Brún
Images: TikTok
Words: Shamim de Brún
Images: TikTok
The schtick is to cover raw chicken beasts in the cough syrup NyQuil, roast and eat. It’s not only a weird abuse of medication; I bet it tastes awful.
Have you ever had an adult cough syrup you liked? Calpol is an outlier we all love, but NyQuil is resolutely rank. If you’ve never tried it, you’re lucky. It does, however, knock you right out, which is probably why it’s not available in Ireland.
So the “sleepy chicken” TikTok trend is mostly a joke, but why waste good chicken? An animal died for your trolling. Respect that and deep fry it like a sane person, please. That way, you can enjoy the succulent goodness of the chicken.
Most of these sleepy chicken videos are being taken down because they’re dangerous if someone doesn’t get the joke. But the trend has become so pervasive that the FDA issued an updated warning on September 15: “Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways. Even if you don’t eat the chicken, inhaling the medication’s vapours while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body. It could also hurt your lungs.”
I wonder how many of these sleepy chickenTikTok trollers were also anti-vax? I bet that Venn diagram is pretty revealing.
If you’re as chronically online as we are, you know this is far from the first time an ill-conceived social media food challenge has gone awry. There was the Benadryl challenge which people died from, according to the FDA. The cinnamon challenge, my tongue will never be the same – RIP—the Tide Pod challenge, which I never got.
If you’re looking for a chicken challenge to partake in, how about making the sexy chicken burger from Gastro Gasy’s book “Hot Fat”? It’s a much better way to honour the chicken who died for your sins.
Elsewhere on CHAR: Why I hate the word foodie
