Probably one of the most prominent documentaries in my life remains Super Size Me. It’s one of only a handful of documentaries that I’ve watched more than once. It followed documentarian Morgan Spurlock as he attempted to survive on nothing but McDonald’s for an entire month, ordering breakfast, lunch, and dinner from the Golden Arches. Every meal came with an entrée, fries, and a drink, and back when McDonald’s still offered Super Size, he agreed to supersize only when the cashier asked if he wanted to. His health absolutely cratered over the course of the experiment. Spurlock has since passed away, though whether or not those two things are connected isn’t something we really know. Another documentary that immediately came to mind while watching Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracy was Food, Inc., another classic that pulled back the curtain on where our food comes from and featured unforgettable footage from industrial meat processing plants. It’s impossible to watch Big Chicken without thinking about those documentaries.

Stand-up comedian Mo Gilligan takes center stage here, representing his love of fried chicken while examining just how deeply fast food chicken has become ingrained in modern culture, particularly in the UK. The first thing that struck me, though, is that his experiment immediately differs from Morgan Spurlock’s in a pretty significant way. Gilligan isn’t eating chicken in general. He’s eating fast food chicken almost exclusively. There’s never really any effort to explore what a healthier, home-cooked chicken diet might look like, because that would become an entirely different documentary. Instead, he spends a month eating fried chicken, chicken nuggets, wings, sandwiches, and other ultra-processed versions of chicken. I don’t think anyone walked into this documentary expecting that to end well.

The film also spends time discussing food deserts, pointing out that even parts of the United Kingdom struggle with neighborhoods where residents have easy access to processed foods but very limited access to fresh produce. That’s an important conversation, but at the same time I found myself comparing Gilligan’s experiment back to Spurlock’s. As unhealthy as McDonald’s can be, Morgan at least occasionally stumbled across a shred of lettuce, a slice of tomato, or a few onions. There were at least traces of vegetables finding their way onto his tray. Gilligan’s diet often boils down to little more than breading and chicken. Even if someone were preparing that exact same menu at home, it’d still be an incredibly unbalanced diet because you’re simply not getting the nutrients your body needs.

That’s one of the inherent problems with documentaries built around these month-long food experiments. We constantly hear that everything should be eaten in moderation, then these films intentionally throw moderation out the window. Nobody should be surprised that someone eating fast food three times a day for an entire month experiences declining health. Unlike Super Size Me, Gilligan also doesn’t repeatedly visit his doctor throughout the experiment. He checks in at the beginning, where he’s healthy, and again at the end, where he isn’t. I can’t imagine anyone expected a different outcome.

From there, the documentary broadens its scope beyond simply eating chicken. Gilligan travels throughout both the United Kingdom and the United States to investigate how chickens are raised, processed, and ultimately served to consumers. We learn about the billions of chickens slaughtered every year, genetically selected for rapid growth, raised in overcrowded and often unacceptable conditions, then processed by workers who frequently endure unsanitary environments, denied bathroom breaks, repetitive injuries, and dangerous working conditions where serious accidents can occur. Unlike Super Size Me, which essentially put McDonald’s in the crosshairs, Big Chicken casts a much wider net. It isn’t interested in attacking a single fast food chain. Instead, it examines the entire industrial chicken pipeline, from factory farms and processing plants all the way to the fast food restaurants selling the finished product.

Normally we say that one thing walked so another thing could run. Honestly, it feels more like Super Size Me and Food, Inc. ran so that Big Chicken could walk. Mo Gilligan really isn’t uncovering much that hasn’t already been covered over the past two decades. But maybe that’s the scariest takeaway. We’re more than twenty years removed from Super Size Me and almost twenty years removed from Food, Inc., yet so many of the same issues are still being discussed. Whether you’re talking about America or the United Kingdom, we’ve made surprisingly little progress toward creating a healthier food system, improving conditions for workers, or changing the way industrial chicken production operates.

What ultimately makes Big Chicken worth watching isn’t necessarily the information. It’s Mo Gilligan himself. As a stand-up comedian, he brings an approachable personality to material that could have become unbearably preachy in someone else’s hands. His jokes and observations help keep the documentary moving, occasionally making you laugh even while the overall picture being painted is pretty unsettling. My favorite sequence comes late in the film when KFC’s global office responds to one of his inquiries. Included is an apparent phone number, so Mo decides to call it while the cameras are rolling. Someone answers the phone but says absolutely nothing. Mo introduces himself, explains that he’s making a documentary, repeatedly asks if anyone is there, and is met with complete silence. The instant he mentions the conversation is being recorded, they hang up. So somebody was definitely listening. They just weren’t interested in participating. Moments like that are the secret sauce that Gilligan brings to the documentary.

Speaking of things that aren’t quite as great in the UK, let’s talk about the audio description. VSI London is really trying my patience here. There’s a sequence where Mo is in Arkansas speaking with an undocumented immigrant who works at a chicken processing plant. The man shows Mo a video on his phone while speaking in Spanish. None of it is translated for blind viewers. The audio description simply tells us that the man is showing Mo a video on his phone. I don’t know why you’d have your audience sit there while Mo watches a video we can’t see without making any effort to bridge that accessibility gap. Even if you accept that the video itself can’t reasonably be described, the Spanish dialogue almost certainly could have been translated if it was presented in subtitles. There were really two obvious solutions available, and somehow the writer chose neither.

It’s like the Robert Frost poem about two roads diverging in a yellow wood. This guy looked at both roads and decided to drive his car straight into the lake. There was a left path and a right path. He could’ve taken the road less traveled or the one everyone else uses, but instead he just launched the car off the bridge. That’s what this decision feels like. So to the writer, I wish you coal in your stocking this Christmas. And to the quality control person who let this slide without asking the obvious questions, well, based on what I just learned from this documentary, I hear KFC is hiring. Maybe go quality check some chicken instead.

Should you check out Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracy? Sure. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, and Mo Gilligan’s personality adds enough flavor to keep it entertaining even if the information itself isn’t especially groundbreaking. If you’ve already seen Super Size Me and Food, Inc., you’ll probably recognize many of the same arguments and findings. But it’s also 2026, and those documentaries are getting older. I keep hearing younger audiences don’t watch older films nearly as much as they probably should, so for some viewers this may be their first real exposure to how our food, particularly our chicken, actually gets from the farm to the fryer. For that reason alone, I think it serves a worthwhile purpose. Nothing here surprised me, but I’ve had more years to watch documentaries that have already explored these issues. Maybe you haven’t. As for the audio description, VSI London has officially landed on my naughty list this Christmas.Fresh: 6.9/10