Depending on what you have done to your algorithm, you may have seen a video for gold chicken wings on Instagram this month.
The video is short, boring and gross. A pile of golden chicken wings sit on a plate. In the corner is a pot of blue-cheese sauce. From nowhere appears a latexed hand. One wing is picked, you hear the word “lit”, the chicken is dipped and the camera pans around to show a pair of lips, turning gold as they chew. With the volume up, you can hear the sound of mastication.
Golden hot wings are the Midasian ruse of Jonathan Cheban, a publicist turned food influencer who, after some wrangling, legally changed his name to Foodgōd. Designed in “collab” with the Ainsworth, a US restaurant that describes itself as multipurpose venue, they cost $45 for 10 or £1,000 for 50 with a bottle of Armand de Brignac champagne.
Foodgōd is famous for appearing on TV with the Kardashians, and designing a phone cover that doubles up as a mirror, but has rebranded himself as a would-be “Anthony Bourdain for the young and hot”. His currency grew on Snapchat, a skill he parlayed into faddy eating. Foodgōd is also whimsical. He likes the ō because it looks like “a halo” but sometimes drops it. Cooking doesn’t interest him – “Chefs cook, I eat out” – but ambiance does. He is the living embodiment of the viral era. He may like gold chicken today, but tomorrow, who knows.
Still, it’s all meaningless unless it tastes good. To make this golden chicken, the meat is brined for 12 hours, coated with a dry rub, baked, flash-fried, smothered in a gold marinade with extra honey barbecue sauce, and finished with a layer of gold dust. For less than £20, I made two versions of my own: one using some edible gold leaf bought from Thailand and a KFC drumstick, and another using imitation gold on a pack of Co-op chicken wings. The gold on the latter attached well to the meat, but it wasn’t actually edible. The Thai gold was, but dissolved into the KFC fat.
Gold needs to be in its purest 24k form to be safe to eat. The problem is, it tastes of nothing. Your body can’t digest it and it has no nutritional value. You might as well be lighting a fag with a burning tenner – the joy, it seems, is in destroying it.
Gold food isn’t new – in 2016 in Manila, a dozen Golden Cristal Ube doughnuts sold for $1,200; in Abu Dhabi, a 24-karat gold flaked cappuccino costs £15 – nor is conspicuous consumerism. But the video’s popularity – “almost 1.5 million viewers and counting!” – is significant. Clean eating, with its focus on greens and juice is dominating the weird world of Instagram food porn. By contrast, Foodgōd and his gold chicken wings seem almost nostalgic.
