FDA Warning on NyQuil Chicken Alerts Many to Existence of NyQuil Chicken | Hacker News Reader

FDA Warning on NyQuil Chicken Alerts Many to Existence of NyQuil Chicken

nytimes.com

41 pointsbookofjoe32 comments

No one's actually eating this. It's a joke, and from the article:

> But it was not clear if people were actually trying it themselves in significant numbers; most people commenting were expressing horror at the concept or making jokes about it. There have been no reports of hospitalizations or deaths related to NyQuil chicken, a tongue-in-cheek recipe that first surfaced in the notorious 4chan forum in 2017 and also received a spike of attention in January.

It's "kids are eating Tide Pods" all over again. Just older generations oblivious to the evolving state of internet jokes, and the media capitalizing on that to drive clicks and ad revenue.

Except that kids were eating tide pods (before the challenges) and that increased during the fame of those challenges. Reports from poison center seems to say there is a clear link.

From the article:

"In a grim precedent, some people really did eat laundry detergent packets in 2018 after a similar “challenge” based on Tide pods took off."

They link to another NY Times article from 2018 titled "Yes, People Really Are Eating Tide Pods. No, It’s Not Safe.":

"In the first half of January, poison control centers handled 39 cases in which teenagers were intentionally exposed to the detergent packets. That was as many as in all of 2016, the American Association of Poison Control Centers said. Last year, poison control centers handled 53 such cases, the group said in a news release."

While that's a non-zero amount, the moral panicking probably caused more than it could've ever helped. For comparison, there's thousands of child washing machine related injuries per year, but probably fewer NYT articles about it.

When the Washing Machine Challenge starts trending on TikTok, there will be an article about it in the "paper of record".

Of course, I had to google. From the UK Mirror, not the Times:

"Boy, 13, stuck in washing machine after bizarre social media challenge went horribly wrong"

-- https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/boy-13-stuck-washin...

I have to admit, I did not know this was a thing. Now I am looking for recipes on allrecipes.

I for one never heard of NyQuil Chicken till today, and it seems to me that this NY Times article will alert several orders of magnitude more people than the FDA's alert.

Would this be an example of the Streisand Effect?

This would be like the Streisand effect if the Streisand effect caused Barbara Streisand's house to be constructed, it feels

Drawing attention to something you don't want someone to do causing the effect you were intending to avoid. The FDA does not want people cooking with Nyquil. By publishing that people are cooking with Nyquil, the FDA has inadvertently increased interest in people wanting to cook with Nyquil.

That's assuming that anyone was cooking with nyquil beforehand, when it seems to have been just an internet trolling campaign.

More like WP:BEANS

And now I badly want to try it

https://archive.ph/pmaOQ

Thank you.

NyQuil chicken is not a thing that people are actually doing, just like the "tide pod challenge" or any number of the completely bullshit moral panics that the news makes up for eyeballs.

We know that a non-zero number of people did the tide pod challenge, and I know a person who ate nyquil chicken. It's reasonable to make an argument that it's too rare to blame the people spreading it, or that the news overstates it, but why would you make an assertion that is so patently false?

This seems like a case where hating news outlets as the default attitude has lead to a wrong assumption.

Counter question, why would you treat a general statement as a literal one?

"not a thing people are doing" is a perfectly true statement even if a non-zero number of people do it, as long as the number is inconsequential.

Typically, when the government tells me not to do something, I really, really want to do it. In this case, nope, Gen Z can keep its Nyquil chicken. I can't imagine anyone who has been forced to consume such vile liquid would ever dream of ..cooking with it...

For what it's worth, some percent of people enjoy the taste of NyQuil, myself included.

NyQuil chicken seems about as insane and beer can chicken, and that’s a real thing.

I'm pretty sure I've seen someone making Cocaine Turkey on the internet, NyQuil Chicken doesn't even surprise me at this point

This does nothing to alleviate my growing suspicion that the majority of the human species is not terribly bright.

Allow me to confirm you're suspicion.

*your

Well at least they're not electrocuting themselves to death like they were a few months ago.

I used to think similarly, but I've come to assume that everyone has holes in their knowledge and many have trouble knowing where the holes are.

It is kind of like learning a language and realizing - when your car breaks down - that you've not learned any of that vocabulary.

These holes sometimes are in fairly practical places. If you simply don't know much about medicine and assume nyquil is safe - and at the same time, don't know much about how cooking changes things (chemistry, if only we taught it this way)... well, you get Nyquil Chicken. Nevermind that this person is intelligent in other areas of their life, this is where they found themselves.

Also, youth. The youth (teens) have more holes and, as a cruel joke, more hormones.

Generally speaking, half the population is of below-average intelligence.

And risk taking is not related to intelligence.

Not in Lake Wobegon they’re not.

I know right, it's shocking how many people actually think this is a real thing. Can you imagine hearing about this or the tide pod challenge and just accepting it as fact without a second thought? Pretty sad tbh

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