Alix Traeger (@alixtraeger) describes herself as a food and lifestyle blogger who is “always hungry,” but it didn’t seem like her appetite was all that piqued after she cracked open a plastic case containing a rotisserie chicken she thought looked a bit suspect.
In her video, she called out some bizarre physical attributes of the chicken that made it look more like a movie prop rather than a cooked bird. Her clip about the strange-looking chicken has accrued over 281,000 views as of Saturday and sparked a litany of comments from viewers who thought there was something wrong with her rotisserie hen as well.
@alixtraeger I swear rotisserie chicken used to be SO MUCH BETTER
♬ original sound – Alix Traeger
“Is it just me or are rotisserie chickens just not made the same? Like look at this white a** chicken it doesn’t even have one seasoning on it! Where is the crispy skin? This is paper! This is my conspiracy theory,” the TikToker says after peeling back a thin filmy layer of chicken skin.
Traeger adds in a caption for the video, “I swear rotisserie chicken used to be SO MUCH BETTER.”
Commenters also seemed to think that the rotisserie chicken was a bit strange looking. “Where did you get that? I have never had a rotisserie chicken that looks like that,” one person wrote.
Several other folks urged her to purchase their birds from Costco. “My Costco chicken NEVER looks like that omg yikes,” one TikToker said.
“Costco would neverrrr,” another echoed.
“Should have gone to Costco,” someone else wrote.
One user had their suggestion for finding the best rotisserie chicken, writing, “You have to go to the grocery store in the worst part of town. They have the best rotisserie chickens.”
Chicken farming as an industry has yielded some drastic changes in the way farm-raised chickens look over the years. The birds have been selectively bred to have bigger breasts, providing more meat per chicken. However, this has yielded some undesirable side effects, such as “woody breast,” i.e. meat that is thick and difficult to eat. Many consumers have also complained about the lack of flavor that has occurred as a result of mass chicken farming practices. Cramped facilities filled with massive protein-bag chickens and low-cost feed have come at the cost of the flavor, and what many say, the overall quality of chicken meat.
Vox wrote that “chickens have gotten ridiculously large since the 1950s” and it doesn’t look like this trend is going to stop anytime soon, as Statista reported the U.S. consumed 98.8 pounds of chicken per capita, and that number is projected to be approximately 106 lbs per capita by the year 2032.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Traeger via Instagram direct message for further comment.
