It’s been more than 40 days since Brisbane’s James Ellis launched his new year’s resolution: to eat an entire roast chicken every day in 2025.
The goal has been met with confusion – “I don’t see his point,” one commenter wrote on @dailyroastchook, the Instagram page tracking Ellis’s quest. Others expressed concern, including a dietitian who suggested he would be at risk of developing scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency.
Brisbane artist James Ellis is not bothered by the naysayers or doubters who think he will give up before the end of the year. “I’m going to do it one way or another,” he says.Credit: Courtney Kruk
But for the most part, people have embraced Ellis’ ambitions.
So far he’s chalked up 9000 followers, an army of supporters who eagerly await his daily updates and chime in with their own recommendations. “Big fan of whatever this is,” one user wrote on day four.
He’s appeared on TV and talk show radio, and has been invited to try gourmet chickens prepared by local chefs.
“This is just lunch to me,” Ellis says, tearing shreds off a roast chicken from Andrews butchery and grill in Indooroopilly Shopping Centre.
“Around Christmas, I did a whole chook to myself,” he continues. “It was easy. And I was like, ‘I reckon I could do that pretty regularly’.”
A friend suggested he eat a chicken every day for a month, film it and upload it to Instagram.
“I thought, all right, challenge accepted.” He later decided to extend the goal to a full year – 365 whole chickens.
“I worked really hard last year, something like six months straight,” he says, disassembling the chicken with alarming speed. “This year, I want things to come to me naturally, just by being myself and putting myself out to the world.”
If anything, Daily Roast Chook is marketing. Ellis, an artist by day, is a talented muralist.
He believes if people can connect with his chicken-eating resolution, and find joy in it, they’ll be more inclined to hire him.
Sizzling Birds, a roast chicken shop in Wishart in Brisbane’s south-east has already approached him to create a mural.
Ellis is not the first to set a goal based on well-seasoned poultry.
In 2022, Philadelphia man Alexander Tominsky set a challenge to eat an entire rotisserie chicken for 40 consecutive days.
“I found eating 40 very challenging,” Tominsky told this masthead. “Also, choosing the driest chickens possible did not help.”
Tominsky’s feat was well-publicised. What began as a private ambition – “it wasn’t until about 30 days in that I started to let people out of my friend circle know what was going on”, he said – ended in a huge public celebration.
A poster inviting people to watch him eat his final chicken was shared online. About 500 people turned out to an abandoned pier in his home town to support him. He later described it as one of the best moments in his life.
“The motivation to eat a chicken every day was fuelled by mania and a compulsive sense of mind,” Tominsky said. “I found something very special in my adventure and I wanted to share that excitement with my community.
“Thankfully, they embraced me rather than run me out of town.”
Tominsky was somewhat repulsed by rotisserie chooks by day 40, and is not likely to set a consecutive chicken-eating goal again. But he is rooting for Ellis.
“I think eating an entire rotisserie chicken every day for 365 days would be absolutely incredible. An excellent accomplishment”.
Ellis has 321 more whole roast chickens to devour. There’s speculation he might set a record.
There’s also speculation his health will be impacted by this diet, a stretched version of Super Size Me for roast chickens.
That particular experiment saw American documentarian Morgan Spurlock attempt to exist on a diet of just McDonald’s for 30 days. It was heavy with social commentary about the fast-food industry, and Spurlock was famously unwell and overweight by the month’s end.
While Ellis’ approach might seem extreme, he’s balancing the chicken with fruit and vegetables at night and “training like a madman” to stay fit. So far, he’s dropped five kilos.
Ellis’ quest to find the perfect bird is taking him across south-east Queensland, from service stations, to specialty chicken shops, to high-end restaurants on James Street.
And while we are all desperate to know exactly why he is doing this, in a news cycle dominated by devastation and distress, does there need to be a reason?
“I’m trying to bring joy. It’s silly and funny, but it’s also sort of benign, it’s harmless.”