Human eat world

Banzz, the broadcast jockey, is eating ramyun. Five bags to be exact, plus a small forest of kimchi. In between bites, he fields chatroom questions from the 11,000 fans who are watching him eat in real-time: what dialect does he speak? Does he like ham? Where did he get his watch? This goes on for fifty minutes until the ramyun is gone; the live-chat window breaks into ecstatic emoticons, and Banzz bids us all a sunny “Annyeong”.

This is Mukbang, a relatively new addition to the Vice/i-D/Distractify canon of Weird Things That Asian People Do, But Nobody Else Understands. Popularised on the South Korean website AfreecaTV, it involves “broadcast jockeys” eating tons of food on webcam to earn “star balloons”— virtual cash from fans, that they can exchange for real-life Won. Some BJs reel in more than 10,000 USD a month this way plus extra from sponsors.

Since peaking in South Korea last year, Mukbang has hopped across the web to spawn vegan webcasts in Britain, and American spin-offs involving waaay too many Doritos. But what, exactly, is the draw of a Mukbang video? There are no bellowing, REAL MEN EAT BACON theatrics here, à la Epic Meal Time. And no fetishism, either; despite what you might think Mukbang isn’t some cutesy take on feederism. Instead, it feels like this whole other thing, cheerful and G-rated and actually... kind of... boring, treading the thin line between spectacle and sundry. Performers are fresh-faced, UNIQLO-wearing 7/10s. They talk about the weather, smile a lot, and say “excuse me” when they burp.

... What keeps us watching?

One theory has it that Mukbang is a cure for loneliness. Like many other East Asian countries, South Korea has a deeply conflicted attitude towards singlehood: 26% of households have just one person in them, and ‘single weddings’[1] are becoming a thing. But at the same time, popular representations of The Good Life also pile on immense pressure to bag a partner, settle down, and never eat dinner alone again. Just ask anyone who’s watched My Secret Romance, and quietly prayed for a version of Sung Hoon- oppa to fall into their laps. Maybe Mukbang succeeds because it plugs this gap between what people have, and what they think they should want: a life of small domestic joys, complete with dinner-time commentary.

Or maybe Mukbang is a kind of dieting aid – vicarious eating for people who like pizza and their S-lines. Videos are structured to mimic a totally immersive experience: from the first-person point of view, to that the way our eyes are level with the BJ’s, it’s easy to imagine that we, too, are stuffing our faces with that 28th slice of pork belly. Enough ink has been spilled on the topic of body image in South Korea– Plastic Surgery Capital of the World— to understand why this might matter. When you’re on your second week of the ‘cup diet’, watching someone else inhale a bucket of chicken wings could well be your reason for living.

But neither of these theories accounts for why Mukbang has captured the hearts of so many non-Koreans, raking in views across the world. Ultimately, I would argue, only so much can be gained from thinking of Mukbang as a weird and exotic oddity, specific to South Korea. Instead, try thinking of it as one expression of a much larger, global idea, which permeates the icky/beautiful space of millennial food culture.

We live in the Age of the Spectacle, where food is visual artefact first and digestive experience second. Think of how Instagram lost its shit over the unicorn frappe, even though it tastes like a ground-up smurf. If Guy Debord could see our brunch videos on snapchat, he might point out that everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation: we spend far more time scrolling yolk porn, idling on Tasty, and watching Binging with Babish than we do putting actual food into our mouths.

The whole point is that for us, food is less about filling our bodies, and more about accumulating shareable, likeable experiences that we can display as social capital. Put into this context, Mukbang makes total sense: we like watching Banzz eat ramyun for the same reasons we like double-tapping photos of egg salad toast. Like other kinds of virtual food, Mukbang lets us push beyond our finite appetites to gather as much knowledge, experience, and foodie capital as possible.

We taste beyond our physical limits, & eat up the world with our eyes.

Art by Ciao Zhiyi, Words by Tjoa Shze Hui