The bird comes in its plastic container, often with a little handle so it can be carried handbag-style. It’s hard to resist its rosemary-scented siren call from the heated supermarket rack. Rotisserie chicken and I go way back: My mother tells me that when I was a baby in a rural Chinese village, my grandmother would dispatch one such meal to us each week via the local bus. To the villagers’ astonishment, I — diaper-clad, 9 months old — consumed each protein delivery with ecstatic abandon.
Later on, our favorite pastime in 2000s Shanghai was picking up pirated American DVDs from our street vendor and demolishing a rotisserie chicken in front of a marathon of bootlegged new releases from across the Pacific. Our fingers would rip apart the caramelized skin (that escaping puff of steam!) to tear off a juicy thigh at the joint, shred breasts strip by strip from the spinal cartilage, dig our nails into the neck grooves where dark flesh hid between bones. We worked with mechanical precision: The internal cavity, dismantled, yields secret pockets of meat, and the rib-cage membrane encases the livery richness of offals. By the time we were done, the chicken was a mound of bones.
When I moved across continents for school, I discovered that rotisserie chicken was a reliable, economical option across the globe. As a young college graduate in D.C., I picked up one on every supermarket trip: an $8.99 meal that I could devour before unpacking the rest of the groceries. To avoid sloshing chicken juice all over canned beans and ice cream, I would walk down the street holding the bird in its pouch, separate from the other bags, turning it into a proudly paraded pet. My roommate snapped a picture.
A few years later, I was waiting for the Boston subway with a rotisserie chicken slung over my shoulder — another accidental fashion moment which my boyfriend at the time captured on camera. I posted these shots to Instagram. As I accrued a photo collection, I started posing with rotisserie chickens intentionally, committing to it as a kind of performance art. I held a chicken in wintry Bryant Park; a chicken next to a highway in Cancun; a chicken outside a Costa Rican Walmart. I perfected the influencer pose: legs out, blasé pout, preferably with shades. I didn’t become internet famous, despite my coy hashtag #sponsoredbytherotisseriechickenlobby; only a dozen friends ever humored my photos with double taps.
I needed to be bolder. So in the chichi downtown of a Mediterranean port, in front of gaping tourists, I took the bird out of its plastic casing and held it like Paris Hilton holds her Chihuahua, directly cradling the chicken’s greasy, still-warm skin. I repeated this stunt in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, where I am most likely blacklisted for public indecency and poultry faux pas. In a Mallorcan village, the tiny superette sold only raw chicken — so I posed on a cobblestone street with the plump, cold, goose-bumped body. In this form, the bird felt more vulnerable, eliciting an élan of tenderness: I will roast you myself, I thought, with a bulb of garlic and lemon. And this felt impossibly adult.
Besides the same 10 friends entertained (or pretending to be entertained) by the bit, no one cared for my chicken art or its evolution. That was OK. The chicken was an inside joke with myself — an act of daring for someone shy and introverted, a child jokester who lost her sense of humor after being catapulted from China to an American boarding school at 16. Posing with chickens was a ridiculous thing to do, and it felt like a retort to the American girls I’d piously studied from those pirated DVDs as a child — Blair Waldorf or Rory Gilmore would never parade raw meat down the street. This grown woman — globe-trotting and capable of strange, attention-grabbing gags — she was really who I had wanted to be as a little girl.
When I first tried dating apps, I put rotisserie chicken in the bulk of my lover-baiting photos. I felt vulnerable offering myself up for swiping, rather than collecting handsome strangers in grocery-store meet-cutes, so maybe my quest for romance could be ironic, nothing desperate or overeager. Most messages I received concerned the chicken. One man asked how I transported raw meat internationally. (Multiple people seemed to think it was the same chicken in each shot.) Another expressed concern at “how greasy your hands are after palming the rotis.” None of these queries resulted in dates, let alone relationships. Perhaps I was destined to live out the rest of my days with my one true love: a glistening, domesticated, literal hunk of meat.
During the pandemic, when a young man in Pennsylvania went viral online for eating one whole rotisserie chicken a day, friends sent me links, suggesting I should outcompete him, or try to date him. He had made it bigger than I had with rotisserie chicken, to be sure. But watching him (wastefully) devour the beasts, I felt not envy but clarity. My own love for rotisserie chicken was earnest — even if I had been pretending that it was parody. Over all these years, long since being my early-childhood comfort food, rotisserie chicken has helped tenderize my social anxieties and break me out of my own plastic casing. I don’t eat it as much these days because my gallbladder can’t digest too much fat (possibly from decades of excessive chicken consumption). Still, when I walk into a grocery store, I gaze at the rows of the rotisserie chickens lovingly. I know you, I whisper. And they whisper back: We know you, too.
Aube Rey Lescure is a writer and the editor in chief of Off Assignment. Her debut novel, “River East, River West,” was shortlisted for the U.K.’s Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024.
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