Jenna Ortega‘s recent appearance on First We Feast’s Hot Ones had people applauding the star’s ability to (literally) face the heat as she worked her way through all ten wings with sauces rating up to seven hundred thousand units on the Scoville scale while barely flinching. But some viewers have been taken aback by Ortega’s choice in sauce delivery vessel. In the episode, the Wednesday actress appears to be enjoying actual bird parts and has some of her fans asking “aren’t you supposed to be vegan?”
Ortega may have an iron will when it comes to spicy foods but it seems like she isn’t so steadfast when it comes to her diet. The Scream star was vegan for some time before she began filming her hit Netflix series Wednesday but she claims that the shoot location in Romania made sticking to her no meat, dairy, or eggs restrictions difficult.
“I stopped being vegan when I went to Romania to shoot Wednesday. The food is very different there and I don’t think that I was meeting my nutrition requirements so I started eating fish again. So I’m currently pescetarian,” she said according to Hola.com.
While that may be true, pescetarianism does not include a chicken option (no matter what your older relatives might think) so even that dietary modification wouldn’t allow for a full gauntlet of chicken wings, spicy or not. While doing publicity for Wednesday, Ortega appeared on a webisode of Netflix’s Taste Buds to share Puerto Rican and Mexican food. During the show she affirmed that she was indeed vegetarian — presumably having abandoned her pescetarian phase after she left Romania.
So what about those wings, then? Well, they most likely came from a cauliflower and not a bird. While many guests do use the traditional chicken wings to enjoy their fiery feasts, Hot Ones makes allowances for its vegetarian and vegan guests by using a cauliflower-based meatless wing, which was likely what Ortega opted for. She’s far from alone. Other famous guests who have taken the Vegan Wing option include Lizzo, Ricky Gervais, Emma Chamberlain, Billie Eilish, Paul Rudd, and Natalie Portman (who actually recommended the brand of wings to the show according to Green Matters).