Pop Culturette Flashback: When Jessica Simpson Thought Chicken of the Sea Was Actually Chicken
By Alexus Mosley
Is Chicken of the Sea chicken… or fish? It’s the question that launched a thousand memes before social media was even a thing. The year was 2003, and Jessica Simpson was about to turn a simple bowl of tuna into one of reality television’s most unforgettable moments.
During the first season of MTV’s Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, Simpson was eating Chicken of the Sea tuna alongside her then-husband, Nick Lachey, when the brand name suddenly had her questioning exactly what was in her bowl. “Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish?” Simpson famously asked. She knew she was eating tuna, but as she explained to a visibly confused Lachey, the whole “Chicken of the Sea” thing was throwing her off. Eventually, Lachey confirmed what America already knew: Tuna is, indeed, fish. But by then, reality television history had been made.
Newlyweds premiered on MTV in August 2003, offering viewers a peek inside the recently married couple’s life together. This was before celebrity reality television became the highly polished industry it is today. Watching famous people argue, clean their houses, go shopping and sit around eating lunch still felt surprisingly intimate, and Simpson was reality-TV gold.
Her unfiltered observations and unintentionally hilarious questions became some of the show’s biggest moments. There was her confusion over buffalo wings, household mishaps and, of course, the tuna heard ’round the world. The Chicken of the Sea scene quickly became one of the defining moments of Newlyweds and helped establish Simpson’s charmingly ditzy television persona, an image that would follow her long after the series ended.
Fortunately, Simpson learned to laugh along with everyone else. More than a decade later, she got the perfect opportunity to revisit her famous tuna confusion when Whole Foods recalled a batch of chicken salad in 2017 after discovering that it actually contained tuna. Simpson shared a story about the mix-up on social media with the perfectly understated response: “It happens to the best of us.” Touché.
Today, the original clip remains a perfect little artifact from an entirely different era of celebrity culture. Just Jessica Simpson, her husband, a bowl of tuna, and one extremely confusing brand name.
And really, who among us hasn’t looked at the words Chicken of the Sea and thought Jessica might have had a point?