NBC's Peacock's terms and conditions (L) Kevin from 'the Office' (M) Chili recipe (R)

@mckenziefloyd/TikTok The Office/YouTube

‘Is it because no one ever reads these?’: TikToker finds chili recipe from ‘The Office’ in Peacock’s terms and conditions

If you've ever wanted to make Kevin's famous chili from 'The Office,' here's your chance.

 

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw

Internet Culture

Posted on Feb 21, 2022   Updated on Feb 21, 2022, 10:13 am CST

Let’s face it: Hardly anyone reads the terms and conditions when they sign up for stuff. But if you scroll all the way through the user agreement for NBC’s streaming service Peacock, you’ll find an unexpected reward—as one TikToker found out.

In a viral TikTok posted last week, TikToker Mckenzie Floyd (@mckenziefloyd) revealed Peacock’s secret Easter egg: A chili recipe from The Office. “Kevin’s famous chili” is famous among Office fans, featured in the slapstick cold open to the episode “Casual Friday,” and recreated IRL by numerous people including the YouTube cooking channel Binging with Babish.

In this TikTok, Floyd scrolls through the entire chili recipe including instructions, saying she discovered it because her boyfriend always reads the terms and conditions.

“Is it because no one ever reads these??” she wrote in the video caption.

@mckenziefloyd Is it because no one ever reads these?? 😂 @Peacock TV ♬ original sound – Mckenzie Floyd

This isn’t the first time Peacock has pulled something like this. When the platform first launched in 2020, the terms and conditions included a recipe for chocolate cake.

Evidently when NBC updated the user agreement in 2021, they decided to swap the cake for a more NBC-specific joke—coinciding with The Office‘s 2021 move from Netflix to Peacock. And to be honest, the recipe isn’t really “hidden.” When you go to Peacocks’ terms page, they namedrop the recipe right up top, with this introduction: “Here, you’ll find answers to your burning legal questions about our service (plus a recipe inspired by Kevin’s famous chili from The Office!)”

The idea that no one reads the T&Cs is definitely a running joke, to the point where other companies have hidden similar Easter eggs in their own user agreements. Over at the Amazon Web Services terms page, you’ll find a zombie apocalypse joke. Following a disclaimer that people shouldn’t use Amazon’s Lumberyard game engine with “life-critical systems,” Amazon waives these restrictions in the case of “a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh.”

That’s a much darker joke than Peacock’s chili recipe. But given that it’s Amazon, what do you expect?

The Daily Dot reached out to Floyd.

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*First Published: Feb 21, 2022, 7:21 am CST