Jessica Simpson (45) Has Never Knowingly Eaten Tuna

There are moments in pop culture so perfectly ridiculous they become permanent. The kind that get quoted at dinners, referenced in tweets twenty years later, and turned into the tagline of an entire career.

Jessica Simpson’s tuna moment is one of those moments. And the full story, from the first bowl of Chicken of the Sea to the Subway lawsuit, is better than you remember.

The Night It Happened

It was the premiere episode of ‘Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica’ in August 2003. Simpson was sitting on a couch, eating a bowl of Chicken of the Sea tuna as part of her Atkins diet, when the question arrived. She turned to Nick Lachey and asked, in complete sincerity, whether what she was eating was chicken or fish.

She acknowledged it was tuna. She just could not figure out why the can said chicken.

The Reaction That Told the Whole Story

Lachey’s expression was the other half of the scene. He stared at her with the look of a man trying to locate the joke and finding only genuine confusion, then patiently explained that Chicken of the Sea was simply a brand name, the same way people who like chicken also like tuna.

MTV producers titled the episode “Chicken by the Sea” because they recognized immediately what they had. The show was pulling close to three million viewers a week, and that scene became the defining image of early reality television.

What She Said About It Years Later

The smartest part of the whole story is what Simpson did with it afterward. Rather than distance herself from the moment, she leaned into it entirely, describing the persona it created as one she actively played into for the cameras.

In her bestselling memoir ‘Open Book,’ she wrote that being the butt of the joke ironically gave her music credibility, and that she did not care about the mockery because the audience was showing up and the albums were selling.

The Franchise It Accidentally Became

Shortly after the episode aired, Simpson traveled to the Chicken of the Sea headquarters in San Diego to sing their jingle with employees. When Whole Foods mislabeled tuna as buffalo chicken salad in 2017, she tweeted at them with generous solidarity: “It happens to the best of us.”

When Subway faced a lawsuit over its tuna several years later, she had thoughts about that too.

The Commercial That Closed the Loop

In 2024, she filmed an official Chicken of the Sea ad with her daughter Maxwell, sitting in the same spot on the couch, recreating the exact scene and this time explaining carefully that Chicken of the Sea is actually tuna, so nobody should get confused. Maxwell asked who would ever get confused by that.

Simpson paused for a very long time before answering. Then in 2026, she took it one step further and recorded a new version of the brand’s original jingle, mixing up the lyrics one more time for old times’ sake before getting them right.

The original question was never really about tuna. It was about how the funniest, most human, most unguarded moment in a room full of cameras can turn out to be the truest thing a person ever puts on television, and how the people smart enough to own it end up winning anyway.