The FDA is Finally Shutting Down 'Nyquil Chicken', TikTok's Most Disgusting Cooking Trend

People flock to TikTok for a lot of things: dance trends, make up hacks, cute dogs, and of course, horrifically traumatizing trends where people eat inedible poisons for fun. 

It's delightful to be a part of a time in history that is known for people being stupid enough to do LITERALLY anything for a couple of likes or a couple of views on their social media page. For instance, remember the Tide Pod challenge? Or the crate climb challenge? The only thing challenged here are the people actually taking part in stupid trends just to get a couple more “friends” looking at their content online. 

2022 has been no exception to this rule. Back in January, a new trend swept the feeds on TikTok called the “Sleepy Chicken Challenge”, which consisted of an enormous surge of cooking tutorials where people were frying, boiling, and cooking slabs of chicken in Nyquil or other flu medicine. 

Yuck.

Firstly, this doesn't sound appealing at all. At least for the Tide Pod challenge, half the challenge was seeing if a person could swallow an object the size of a golf ball. The sleepy chicken challenge is inhuman in itself because you have to actually chew and eat the chicken after it's turned blue and been cooked in cough syrup. Horrific. 

Whatever derangement these people are suffering from, must be effecting their lives heavily since they are willing to gobble down a sinuous, Shrek-colored slab of meat that tastes like cherries, Vicks Vapor Rub, and destruction of brain cells. You'd think that people with so few brain cells already would not be willing to risk the loss of any more. Alas. 

Fortunately, 9 months later, the FDA teamed up with TikTok and has decided to do the bare minimum. They issued a small warning to people, advising against consumption of more than a bottle of Nyquil with a side of white meat. The FDA obviously has never heard of Lean before. Regardless, TikTok was taking even bigger steps to halt the trend, deleting and removing the “tutorial” videos and banning the search of any related tags such as “sleepy chicken”, “nyquil chicken”, etc.

Like with all TikTok trends, all we can do is wait for people to grow bored and tired of seeing the same thing, which, with the usual 1.5 second attention-span of most TikTokers, shouldn't be much longer.  So as long as we're not consuming laundry detergent, drinking bleach, or cooking meats with acetaminophen, the world will continue to turn and churn out more horrible things for children to attempt to eat.