the internet will take your opinion now

everyone’s a critic.

Anytime I cook chicken for someone, I’m worried about killing them.

I have a weird paranoia about accidentally giving people salmonella, even though this has never actually happened to me before. The worry persists even when I can see with both eyes that my chicken is cooked all the way through, and even though my doctor said I had 20/20 vision last time I got my eyes checked, meaning they (my eyes) should be a reliable source.

Still, if the person I’ve fed my chicken to contacts me anytime in the next 48 hours alluding to feeling unwell (sore throat? slight headache?? sprained ankle!!?), I immediately think it is because of my chicken.

How I got so paranoid about chicken is a mystery, but the never-ending online debate over whether we should wash meat before cooking it probably hasn’t helped. This discourse appears to have surfaced on Twitter during the mid-2010s, and yet the matter has still not been settled for good.

I love a divisive conversation – bonus points if I can be a fly on the wall – so, naturally, I’m always getting sucked into reading these types of online threads. But in true Libra fashion, both sides of this intense dispute make sense to me. I can’t tell who is correct.

To sum it up: if you wash your chicken, you’ll get the slimy gunk off, but will run the risk of accidentally splashing salmonella all over your kitchen. This is essentially a game of Russian roulette, because even if you scrub the shit out of your sink afterwards, you could unknowingly miss some spots elsewhere. Queue the possibility of food-borne illness in the future.

If you don’t wash your chicken, you’ll likely avoid a contaminated kitchen, but will rely solely on the cooking process to rid your meat of any obscure, bacteria-hosting slime. In the event that some dirt or unknown matter was on your chicken when you bought it, you’ll have to accept you’ll be eating some of that, I guess? This is equally kind of gross.

I mention this chicken predicament because it has not only left me confused about what I should do in the kitchen, but because it’s pushed me towards a completely different revelation.

On the almost weekly occasion that I see this debate pop up, I am fascinated that there continues to be thousands of people who are ready to weigh in. It is truly dazzling to see how strongly so many people feel about this subject.

Rather than compelling me to bathe or not bathe my chicken, I’m only left with more questions.

Do people really think they are morally superior because they give their chicken a shower before cooking it? Why do people care what total strangers are doing in their own homes to food they definitely won’t be eating? What might the world be like if we were as determined to solve complex societal issues as we are about reaching an indisputable truth about chicken washing?

On a broader scale, how insane is it that people are so willing to passionately express their opinions about any and every little thing they see on the internet?

a polite, yet slightly saucy tweet written by a proponent of chicken-washing

The way we interact via our tiny screens is radically different to our real-life conversations.

Most people would find it annoying and exhausting to chat to someone who is clearly trying to ‘win’ every discussion. Yet this hostile, competitive language is what dominates most online spaces.

It’s become impossible to ignore the ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ connotations pouring out of every post on X or Instagram. It’s also clear that the ‘what about me?’ effect has infiltrated internet users’ brains so severely that posting online is now seen as an open invitation for the public to play the victim or criticise unabashedly.

If you’re someone who resists opening the comment section of every post you see, I commend you. You’re saving yourself a lot of frowning, eye-rolling, and unnecessary mental gymnastics.

Sadly, my thumb is incapable of letting me watch a Reel without tapping the speech bubble that reveals the thoughts of hundreds of people I don’t know and never will. And while the comment section can definitely be entertaining, I’ve often had to remind myself that most people aren’t as insufferable as they appear to be online.

I don’t know why people are like this in digital spaces – annoying, entitled, and argumentative – other than having the security of a screen to hide behind.

Perhaps it’s all for engagement and clout, or maybe it’s just because they’re bored and they can, which is admittedly kind of pathetic, too. We gain nothing tangible from this behaviour.

Perhaps more disappointingly, I don’t have a definitive answer for the chicken-washing dilemma. I am just going to do what my Granny did, because she fed our family of like 30 people every weekend for decades and no one ever died. Not telling you what that is, though, because I’m scared of you.

That said, when I’m feeling brave, I make really REALLY delicious lemon pepper chicken wings using this air fryer recipe. I share them with people I like a lot, then proceed to check on them over the next few days to make sure they’re still in good health.

You know, as one typically does.

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