Put the camera down and eat your dinner

A Korean mukbang: what people will do for fame

The chef looked out of his kitchen in the Yarra Valley into the dining room: what on earth was going on? At one of the tables, a couple had set up a tripod: they were in fact live streaming video of the young lady eating. The guy ate nothing. Later, when she had eaten a substantial amount, there was friction with the staff about what should be paid for and what should not. Did they not know she was famous and was in fact giving them an enormous amount of good publicity?

The restaurant had been mukbanged. It’s a Korean thing that plays on the phenomenon of ASMR, or “autonomous sensory meridian response”.

So we’ve all had our rants about photography in the dining room, and people who watch the food go cold just so that they can put something on Instagram to tell their friends they were at a fancy restaurant and ate a cold – but beautifully shot – dish by some famous chef. It’s miserable, millennial, attention-seeking nonsense. But just when did it become OK to broadcast video from a restaurant table while other customers are all around, and then try to play the Influencer hand?

Mukbang is broadcast eating, with particular emphasis on the aural aspects of the procedure: the slurping, the mastication, the crunching, grinding, the swallowing, the smacking of lips. Noisy food, apparently, makes for good content.

Watching and listening to strangers eat appeals to certain people. There are specific live-streaming eating channels, some with commentary, some without. According to the website Food Republic, it’s a rapidly growing genre that has spawned stars with upwards of half a million followers. One such star is Yammoo; she has more than 672,000 subscribers. What people will do for fame.

Apparently mukbang “hosts” provide company for viewers dining alone and in some cases act as their avatars, eating whatever the audience wants them to. According to an article on theverge.com, if the menu of the day was pork belly, for example, you could ask that the diner wrap the meat in some lettuce and take a big bite. The same article quoted a 2018 survey by Korea’s Ministry of Education that found Korean kids rank “YouTuber” at number five on a list of dream jobs (athlete was one, teacher two).

If you want to see something completely weird, Google “ASMR fails”. The phrase food pornography never seemed more appropriate.

Now, watching Korean women torment live molluscs and crustacea and then eat them in a particularly vulgar manner is not my thing. But, you know, each to his own. I do admit, however, like millions around the world, to having taken perverse pleasure from a video that went viral earlier this year of the Korean woman who decided that eating a live octopus would be good for her subscription numbers. (A lot of mukbang videos involve eating live sea creatures; obviously eating raw seafood can be pretty amazing, and the fresher the better, but I really think creatures should be dead first. Seems that for a some Koreans, that’s optional.) Anyway, the cephalopod in the video bit back, so to speak, and clamped onto the woman’s face, eventually drawing blood. It makes for great viewing.

But as a rule I think this obsession with cameras and food has gone way too far. Can we just eat already?