NyQuil Chicken / Sleepy Chicken

About

NyQuil Chicken, also known as Sleepy Chicken or Bedtime Chicken, refers to a recipe where chicken is marinated in the cold and flu medication NyQuil, giving it a greenish or blueish color, to help treat cold or flu symptoms. An image of NyQuil chicken was first posted online in April 2017 and went viral online that year. In 2020 TikTokers began making the chicken, mostly in ironic videos, sparking health concerns from professionals. TikTok has since banned the trend following negative media attention warning about the health risks of making the chicken.

Origin

On April 1st, 2017 an anonymous user of 4chan's^[8] /ck/ (cooking) board made a post showing an image of some chicken breasts, writing, "You guys wanna see my Sleepytime Chicken?" The anon then proceeded to photograph the entire process of making "Sleepytime chicken," a mixture of Nyquil and chicken (shown below, click to expand). An screenshot collecting the entirety of the thread was posted to /r/4chan^[9] the next day.

Spread

On April 20th, 2017, Twitter^[1] user @trjstn posted two images of chicken, one showing the chicken soaking in a pot of NyQuil and another showing three pieces of chicken on a plate next to the NyQuil bottle, captioned, "if she makes you nyquil chicken…. do NOT let her go" (shown below). The post gained over 6,600 likes and 4,400 retweets in five years. The image was posted to /r/shittyfoodporn^[2] the next day, the user writing, "Someone on Facebook posted this. Nyquil marinated chicken," gaining over 3,700 upvotes in the same span of time.

On December 17th, 2019, YouTuber D1GS1TE posted a video making NyQuil chicken and eating it with his friends, who find it gross, gaining over 5,000 views in two years, with the video later being removed off the platform. On September 4th, 2020, TikToker^[4] @igrobflo posted a seemingly ironic video where he cooks up two chicken breasts in NyQuil, saying he likes to use "four-thirds" of the bottle and exclaiming that the steam makes you sleepy, using a hair straightener throughout to flip the meat (shown below). He ends the video saying "Bone Apple Tea," a phrase mimicking "bon appétit" that is often used along with imagery or videos of unappetizing food. The video was removed off Tiktok, but on January 1st, 2022, the YouTuber Action Jaxon^[10] uploaded a reaction to the original (shown below).

Health Concerns

On January 15th, 2022, Yahoo! Life^[3] reported on TikTok's NyQuil Chicken videos, where a doctor suggests it is dangerous, saying, “When you cook cough medicine like NyQuil, however, you boil off the water and alcohol in it, leaving the chicken saturated with a super concentrated amount of drugs in the meat. If you ate one of those cutlets completely cooked, it’d be as if you're actually consuming a quarter to half a bottle of NyQuil.” On January 16th, Jimmy Fallon joked about the trend during his opening monologue on The Tonight Show (shown below). On the same date, Forbes^[5] covered the trend in an article.

TikTok began removing videos making or referring to NyQuil chicken around the same time, showing a warning message if the user searches "nyquil chicken."^[6] On January 17th, Newsweek^[7] posted a story warning against the trend.

FDA Warning

On September 20th, 2022, the trend reemerged on Twitter, which caused the FDA to get involved and release a statement calling on people to not use Nyquil at any time in their cooking process. They also cited the videos seen online, as TikTok still appears to host several videos of cooking Nyquil chicken or encouraging others to, even after the ban and purge of videos in the past (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References