Last month, Vice MUNCHIES ran a documentary on Mukbang, a food craze that’s getting serious traction over in Korea. Yes, a lot of us are guilty of instagramming pictures of our meals, some of us might follow hashtags like #modelfood or have got into websites like Celebrities Eating Dot Com and galleries on gossip sites called things like 'Celebrity food frenzy' but what about live streaming yourself eating? And eating huge quantities of food, complete with microphones so those commenting and messaging you and watching you throughout can hear the sounds you’re making? That’s what professional live-eaters, or BJs (mind out of the gutter, please - it stands for Broadcast Jockey), do in Korea, broadcasting their huge meals to hundreds of thousands of people at a time. Mukbang, after all, is a combination of the Korean word for eating (muk-ja) and broadcasting (bang-song). Their fans watch them eat, ask questions, chat to them throughout and send them donations in the form of internet currency, like bitcoin - allowing the BJs to prepare, broadcast and eat the food as a full-time job. But why is it so popular?
Vice's Charlet Duboc went over to Korea to investigate the trend of these Food YouTubers (FoodTubers?) and we had a chat with her about what she discovered.
‘For a country heavily married to technology, its kind of normal. It’s also the selfie capital of the world, and this is almost a moving food selfie,’ Charlet told The Debrief. ‘There’s also not one type of BJ, there are boys an girls of all weights, but the most popular BJs are the really, really skinny girls who eat insane amounts of food. More food than you can ever imagine. They do this everyday and never put on weight, so there is some fascination on that side of it.’ Broadcast on Afreeca TV, a publicly-listed social networking site only available in South Korea, it's basically a YouTube-Facebook-Television hybrid that we'll be hooked on in a few years time - while most of it hinges on online gaming, around 5% of the 5,000 channels streaming at any given point in time are eating broadcasts. Users watch broadcasts on their phones (78.5% of the entire population of South Korea are on smartphones and there are 7 million people riding the wifi-connected Seoul subway network every day) and are able to chat directly with the star of the show their watching, in this case, the person eating.
I’m sure there is an element of attraction to the BJ, but its not all about sex
While the knee jerk reaction is to yell ‘Sexual fetish time’ - especially considering that one translation of ‘Mukbang’ could be ‘food porn’ - it’s no weirder than the fact that we (or a lot of us) watch Man vs Food - an incredibly popular show featuring, in case you're not aware, a healthy looking man eating an unhealthy amount of food. The only difference with this is that, in Korea, they're not masking a food obsession with acceptable primetime TV formats, but openly catering for a side of us that apparently really, really, wants to watch people chowing down.
‘I’m sure there is an element of attraction to the BJ, but its not all about sex,’ Charlet says. ‘Just like I’m sure some people have a crush on Nigella Lawson, but her shows and books aren’t all about that. It’s more about the interactive nature - people like to communicate with others online, its a family sort of thing. The fans chat to each other during broadcasts.’ The fascination may also come from the same part of our brains that can't help but look at weird shit that blows our minds - whether it's Bear Grylls climbing into a snake pit, *QI, *or very small women eating ridiculous amounts of food - which is why a lot of BJs stay online for an hour after eating the food, to prove they haven't thrown it up. Just like a good old eating competition, it's a test of human endurance, with added conversation, communication and community in the form of instant messaging.
A more likely explanation, is that a lot of the fans want to eat vicariously through the BJ they're watching on the screen. In a recent interview with CNN, BJ-extraordinaire Park Seo-Yeon explains: 'My fans tell me that they really love watching me eat because I do so with so much gusto and make everything look so delicious. A lot of my viewers are on diets and they say they live vicariously through me, or they are hospital patients who only have access to hospital food so they also watch my broadcasts to see me eat.' She can, in one broadcast, polish off four large pizzas or three kilograms of beef; as well as the mesmerising aspect of watching a tiny woman perform mind boggling digestive feats, it's also helped people: 'One of the best comments I ever received from a viewer who said that she had gotten over her anorexia by watching me eat,' she told CNN. 'That really meant a lot to me.'
On top of this, in South Korea, eating together is incredibly important. It's a huge part of the culture, so it makes sense that people want to eat, in real time, with others: 'The culture is so different there, and society is structured so differently, that you can't look at this with a Western brain,' says Charlet. 'You have single person households, and because eating together is so ingrained in their culture, they get lonely and want to eat with somebody - some watch BJs eat for that reason.'
I asked one guy ‘If you weren't a BJ, what would you do?’ and he was like ‘I’d work in a convenience store’
In Charlet's attempts to get to the real meaning behind Mukbang, she found the BJs themselves to be totally normal, both on and off the camera, as opposed to a lot of celebrities who display a lot less talent (if eating this amount of food isn't a talent, I don't know what is). ‘I was unable to work out how much was motivated by money, the BJ not wanting to eat alone, or just liking the attention,’ explains Charlet. ‘They all just seemed like average people - I asked one guy ‘If you weren't a BJ, what would you do?’ and he was like ‘I’d work in a convenience store’.
Trying to understand the fans, on the other hand, was a little harder - aside from enjoying the way a particular BJ eats, and making them feel a bit less lonely (although this isn't a culture that necessarily just attracts weird loners), she found them to be completely hooked to the technology involved in the broadcast. For example, when she went along to a meal where four mega-fans had got the chance to eat with their favourite BJ in real life, the experience was pretty singular: ‘She broadcasted the whole thing on her phone, and while the men who were eating, were clearly thrilled, they couldn't look at her or talk to her. The whole time they were eating, they were watching the broadcast on their phones. Despite the fact that she was right in front of them.’
How many times have you been at an event, seen a life-changing sunset/sky/insert something awesome in the literal sense of the word, and spent the whole time watching it through a tiny screen, trying to replicate the experience via your phone? This is the next step; being face-to-face with people you usually see online, and watching the ‘real’ conversation via your phone.
While, yes, Mukbang is initially weird or strange to us - it’s actually far more familiar than we'd immediately think. From those inconspicuous 'What's in [insert famous person]'s fridge?' features in women's mags, to showing the world what we had for dinner via social media - it's more than diet advice, or tips on how to make delicious flans. Mukbang only roughly translates to 'food porn' because we invented the phrase 'food porn', and there isn't an exact translation over there. We openly discuss food in the sense that it's like porn - so what's weird about watching some people eating food on camera?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.