Words: Isaac Quirke (he/him)
CW: Eating disorders
Feeling hungry? On your own again? Netizens of South Korea have the solution for you – the “mukbang”. In a culture that stigmatises eating alone, mukbang (a shortened form of ‘eating broadcast’ in Korean) was created as a solution for an increasingly solitary society to engage in a wholesome simulation of communal dining. The concept is simple – a broadcaster will film themselves eating a meal and upload it to social media. But the internet rarely allows for something to remain pure for very long. In recent years, mukbang content has gained rapid international popularity, but in the process of its widespread dissemination, the intentions of both its creators and consumers have soured.
Search “mukbang” on YouTube and you’ll stumble upon garish thumbnails barely able to contain the mounds of neon-orange foods within their digital confines. Fast food, extra-hot Korean Buldak noodles, and fried chicken drowned in cheese sauce, are all important fixtures of the new mukbang diet. Audiences can’t get enough — the most popular mukbang creators receive views and subscriber counts in the millions.
Tragically, following this, the concept has been corrupted from a digitised ritual to a grotesque performance of gluttony. The hallmarks of a pleasant, communal dining ceremony have been ripped apart by savage teeth. Each grisly morsel is presented to the audience, crammed into every last corner of the mouth, and choked down. The goal? Maximum consumption in one sitting. Creators don’t even bother to stop for air before their orifices are stuffed full once again. A new dynamic has been established; the “creator” and the “observer” use gluttony as the vehicle through which they consume each other.
It’s hard to believe when watching any recent mukbang that the audience is eating too, as the pleasure is no longer derived from communal participation. It is instead derived from the spectacle, the eye-widening feeling you might expect watching someone face a challenge in I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! Audiences crave that sickening cocktail of morbid curiosity and contempt, as they live vicariously through those willing to transgress social norms of culinary restraint. This glorification of binge eating has dangerous implications. There is a poisonous relationship between the consumption of mukbang content and eating disorders, due to its potential to provoke bingeing or restrictive episodes. As registered dietician Abbey Sharp states in her YouTube video on the topic, ‘the very act of bingeing is disorderly and dangerous and triggering… This is not a normal way to eat’.
The dynamic darkens further when considering the consequences of participating in this kind of content creation. Sure, you could spit the food out between takes, but that doesn’t satiate the audience’s hunger for the grotesque. As success grows, so does the list of ailments mukbang creators experience: ill health, drastic weight gain, and mental health issues. Furthermore, commenters, who had previously encouraged or even goaded creators to perform these feats of consumption, now take on a self-righteous air, feigning concern or chastising broadcasters for participating in the industry that the audience themselves have created.
You’d think this reaction would give creators an incentive to slow down or give up, but with controversy comes further attention and, crucially, revenue. During the height of his internet fame, Nicholas Perry, known under the moniker of Nikocado Avocado, flaunted the penthouse apartment he purchased with the money he made, from the billions of views garnered from his YouTube channel. In a world of unstable economies, rising cost of living, and the hypnotising allure of celebrity status, mental and physical health are an easy trade-off.
Things seemed to be signalling the end for Nikocado Avocado when he disappeared from his YouTube channel in February 2024, morbidly obese and requiring a CPAP machine and mobility scooter. He returned to his channel in September, just a thin shadow of his former self, having pre-recorded videos to drip-upload in his absence, while he took two years off to lose 250 pounds in what he called his ‘greatest social experiment’. Is this an acceptance by one of the industry’s largest creators that there is a limit to what can be reaped positively by participating in this form of content creation? Or, at second glance, is this an admission that attention is the most addictive gluttony of mukbang culture, to be obtained by any means possible?
The internet is an industry with nothing left to exploit but connection itself. It is thus unsurprising that, in a culture obsessed with food, attention, and money, what once represented something as precious as a meal shared between loved ones, could become food for the insatiable. Perhaps this craze will follow Nikocado Avocado’s example, and reduce down once more to its original essence. Or maybe audiences will find something else to mindlessly chew on…
Still feeling hungry?
References:
Choe, Hanwool. “Eating Together Multimodally: Collaborative Eating in Mukbang, a Korean Livestream of Eating.” Language in Society, vol. 48, no. 2, 2019, pp. 171-208.
Kircaburun, Kagan, et al. “Problematic Mukbang Watching and its Relationship to Disordered Eating and Internet Addiction: A Pilot Study among Emerging Adult Mukbang Watchers.” International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, vol. 19, no. 6, 2021, pp. 2160-2169.
Strand, Mattias, and Sanna A. Gustafsson. “Mukbang and Disordered Eating: A Netnographic Analysis of Online Eating Broadcasts.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, vol. 44, no. 4, 2020, pp. 586-609.
Sharp, Abbey. “Why the MUKBANG Trend Is Glorifying Eating Disorders.” Www.youtube.com, www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2pYg76yi7I. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
“After Eat with Boki’s Sponsorship Scandal, Is Korean YouTube Culture Broken?” South China Morning Post, 13 Sept. 2020, www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/3101201/eat-bokis-moon-bok-hee-just-latest-mukbang-star-be.
Nikocado Avocado. “MY NEW HOUSE TOUR – I Bought a $2,300,000 Million Dollar Penthouse.” YouTube, 1 Apr. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-tOb3SDeRw. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
Nikocado Avocado. “Two Steps Ahead.” YouTube, 6 Sept. 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkGjoRPpWqA. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
