What was so captivating about the "rotisserie chicken guy" who ate 40 whole birds in 40 days?

Food has a unique place in the social media realm. In a landscape of overtly wasteful "cooking videos" crafted for nothing other than gross-out humor and clout — not to mention cringeworthy recipe videos like Paula Patton's fried chicken — a certain wholesomeness came through, breaking through the sardonic, hard-edged shell of the internet's collective consciousness. As Jake Nivens writes for Interview Magazine, "On Sunday, the morning after the Phillies lost to the Houston Astros in the World Series, he lifted the spirits of some hundreds of Philadelphian who gathered at an abandoned pier behind a Walmart to watch Tominsky eat his 40th and final chicken." In an interview with The Takeout, Tominsky states that he's tried rotisserie chicken from Acme, Rittenhouse Market, Giant, Shop Rite, Walmart and Boston Market. In speaking about the chicken, Tominsky told Nivens that he chose rotisserie chickens because they're "kind of like a sensory bomb.