40 Chickens in 40 Days: How a Philadelphia Man Cheered His City

What does one learn when eating dozens of chickens? Well, he said, that they are like a “sensory bomb.”

The dark meat is too salty and greasy, he said. The white meat is dry. When he pokes and grabs the meat, his fingers become oily, and each time he digs back in for more, the slimy sounds make him recoil. While struggling to make it through the last 11 days of the challenge, Mr. Tominsky said he’d chew the chicken into small pieces, mush it in his mouth and slurp it down with water. “Basically, I drank the chicken,” he said.

Still, Mr. Tominsky said, doing it felt worthwhile because the downsides from eating 40 chickens felt “microscopic in comparison to what the world lives with and sees everyday.”

“This is going to sound strange, but if I happened to, for some silly reason, pass away from this,” he said, “I would have been OK with the sacrifice.”

His city has repaid that commitment with an outpouring of praise. Some asked if he could run for mayor or president. One person said a photo of Mr. Tominsky showing his stomach, taken mid-challenge on Sunday, belonged in a museum.

On Sunday, as Mr. Tominsky prepared to finish his last salty bite, he stood up from his table, faced the crowd and played Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia.”

“Ain’t no angel gonna greet me,” Mr. Springsteen crooned. Then Mr. Tominsky raised his hand in the air and screamed his version of the next line: “It’s just you and me my friends!”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/us/philadelphia-chicken-man.html