Extreme Eating
• Photo by Jasmine Fisher
What does the rise of livestream fads such as mukbang say about our relationship not just with food, but bodily pleasure? Welcome to the world of extreme eating.
Every Monday, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson Instagrams his Sunday-night cheat meal: generally an ocean’s worth of sushi followed by (his) head-sized chocolate chip cookies, drenched in a jar of peanut butter. As bizarre as it might sound, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s #CheatMealSunday #AkaFoodPornSunday posts are my Monday morning Insta-scroll #highlight. The Rock is close to three times my size, towering over my five-foot-nothing at a peak of almost two metres and weighing in at a boulder-worthy 118 kilograms. Examining the incomprehensible scale of his #SundayCheatMeal each Monday morning, I take a moment to imagine what it must be like to be physically able to ingest that much food. What it must feel like to live in a body of that size. To move through the world with that much bulk. This is a visceral experience; for a moment, I can actually taste the feeling of being a literal giant among men.
And I’m not alone.
Watching other bodies perform as a means of triggering a visceral and pleasurable personal response is basically what the internet was invented for. Your thinking has probably gone straight to porn, certainly an anecdotally – if not statistically – significant part of the internet. But affective human–computer interaction (HCI) subcultures are as numerous and varied online as internet users themselves: from extreme fitness hashtags providing #fitspo to ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) recordings that leave their viewers quivering from the rustling turn of a book page. From haul videos celebrating recent shopping splurges to pimple popping extravaganzas and how-tos for creating your own tulpa, the internet truly does have something for everybody.
I was catching up on #SundayCheatMeals, waiting impatiently for a friend in a bustling Brunswick bar, when I slipped down one of the more intriguing rabbit holes of online affective pleasure. Hopping from hashtag to hashtag, I stumbled past the six impossible things before #breakfast and landed on #mukbang.
• Photo by Jasmine Fisher
Directed towards ‘videos you may like’, I was presented with a platter of petite girls with wide-searching eyes shovelling a seemingly endless supply of food through the portal of their delicate painted lips. Noodles, tteokbokki, mushrooms, fried chicken, kimchi, chillis – and that was just one video. Here was one little doll using chopsticks to direct a family’s worth of ramen noodles from pot to stomach (seemingly without chewing), while she smiled at the camera and made bunny ears for the people watching at home. Here, another figurine giggled as she crammed mochi balls into her face’s aperture. Here was a close-up of eminently fuckable blood-red lips engorged with a rice cake and miso sauce concoction.
“What the hell is this?” I wondered.
A portmanteau formed from the Korean words ‘meokneun’ (먹는, eating) and ‘bangsong’ (방송, broadcast), mukbang first emerged on South Korea’s internet channel AfreecaTV in 2008, when vlogger Tae-hyun hosted an on-camera barbecue with friends on his Muck-Show. Over the next two years, the form grew rapidly and, by the early 2010s, mukbang was recognisable as a new kind of food show. By 2016, 10-15 percent of AfreecaTV’s channel content was devoted to mukbang.
The popularity of mukbang is reflected in the huge income generated by the genre’s most popular ‘hosts’ or ‘BJs’ (broadcast jockeys). Although the channel is free to consume, viewers who like a performance can elect to send the hosts a ‘star balloon’ at a cost of 10 US cents. AfreecaTV takes around 30-40 percent of that, leaving the performer with 60-70 percent. Superstar host BJ TheDiva has reported earnings upwards of US$9,000 per month – a profit approaching $6,000, even after footing her $3,000 monthly food bill.
Although mukbang may first appear to be all about gluttony (or its more disturbing cousin, binging), there are a number of specifically Korean explanations for its popularity. Echoing a number of academics and social commentators, AfreecaTV public relations coordinator Serim An has suggested three reasons for the genre’s immense success: increasing rates of sole-occupant living; young Koreans’ increasing feelings of loneliness; and broader trends related to wellness culture and excessive dieting.
In South Korean culture, eating is a communal activity linguistically rooted in the notion of kinship: a common word for ‘family’ (식구, shikgu) translates literally as ‘those who eat together’. Reflected in the setting of the traditional Korean family dinner table – a collection of shared side dishes eaten over individual bowls of rice – this communal style of eating does not lend itself to lone dining. Many restaurants, similarly, do not cater to individual eaters. For those living by themselves, the memory of the family dinner table encapsulates both an emotional and a corporeal longing: a nostalgia for food tasted and company enjoyed – both of which mukbang satiates.
“We have long consumed the feminine body in service of our own physical and emotional needs.”
• Photo by Jasmine Fisher
• Photo from Genetics Gym by Adam Peacock
Park Seo-yeon, aka BJ TheDiva, claims this as the reason her fans like her style. “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,” she says. By their own admission, BJ TheDiva’s fans use her body as a means to satiate their own needs and desires. And this can also encompass the satiation of seemingly illicit desires.
Rachel Ahn – who performs under the name Aebong-ee – says that most of her viewers are women, and women who are on a diet. “So you call this a sort of gratification through others,” she says of her fans’ vicarious consumption of her “ferocious” eating, for three hours every night, of enough food to feed a family of six.
Nostalgia, family and communal meals are certainly an important aspect of mukbang’s popularity in South Korea. But, mukbang’s role in stirring and slaking diet-formed desire – especially for many young women who are fans of the form – cannot be discounted. As a product of gender norms relating notions of femininity to self-control and waist size, mukbang’s links to diet and food-based desire have become its defining features since its expansion beyond Korea, leaving its social aspects largely forgotten.
In April 2015, mukbang went global when New York media company and YouTube stars Fine Brothers Entertainment used the format in one of their ‘React’ videos. An onslaught of mukbang-related Google searches ensued. Three weeks later, US mukbang was born when haul video superstar Trisha Paytas uploaded a 40-minute video of her gorging on cupcakes, chips, eggs and toast. Since then, mukbang has become a strong subculture in US online media platforms.
As in South Korea, US mukbang has its superstars and fan favourites. But in contrast to Korean shows, where the majority of performers remain waif-like young women, the bodies who host US mukbang, though still predominantly feminine, run the gauntlet. Extreme fitness BJ Erik ‘The Electric’ Lamkin, who has struggled with anorexia, likes “eating a large amount of food … lifting heavy weights … cycling a lot”. He hosts a website featuring both mukbang and exercise videos. Fat proud Chunky challenges cultural ideas associated with weight and the enjoyment of food through her YouTube channel, ‘Eat with Chunky’. The lobster-loving Bethany Gaskin and Christi Caston simultaneously challenge traditional norms of femininity and beauty through their sensuous gorging and proud celebration of black culture.
Like its Korean originator, US mukbang is interactive, with a steady stream of viewer comments, suggestions and reactions. Yet unlike Korean mukbang, most US videos tend to be pre-recorded and posted to YouTube, rather than live streamed. And the video comments tend towards the disparaging and even outright hostile, criticising everything from a performer’s choice of spread to the way their body looks, and even how they chew their food. As Erik Lamkin said: “Be prepared for people to critique how you eat.”
But, as in Korea, US mukbang satiates both an emotional and a physical need for its viewers, though taking on an arguably more extreme form. BJs like La Delicia de Linda have stated that, while some young Korean women may use mukbang as a diet tool, “…the crowd in the US tends to be people with eating disorders”. Both Linda and Erik have shared stories of anorexic fans spurred to eat by the wanton abandon with which the BJs eat on camera. Bulimic fans, on the other hand, report feeling emotionally satiated by the videos, and successfully use this feeling to stave off the corporeal longing to binge. In response, nutrition and fitness experts like New Jersey’s Erin Palinski-Wade have argued that, while these videos may satiate cravings for some dieters, for many susceptible viewers they’re more likely to trigger disordered eating than assist its quenching.
• Photo by Jasmine Fisher
Health psychologist Dr Traci Mann told Eater these responses are related to broader cultural narratives of eating and morality. “It makes your own virtues apparent because you’re not doing that. The people in these videos are doing something worse than you would ever do, and that makes you feel better about yourself in comparison.”
Unashamedly revelling in the physical pleasure of eating discretionary food, US mukbang may well be the flipside of contemporary wellness culture. While extreme diet culture emphasises asceticism and discipline as the means to both enlightenment and success, mukbang counterpunches with gorging and engorged young women bodies which somehow manage to never gain a pound. But while mukbang might seem the inverted nightmare-scape of extreme diet and fitness regimens, both subcultures drive and are driven by broader cultural understandings of bodies, femininity, food and morality.
The relationship between women’s bodies, food and screens isn’t new. The first ‘TV dinner’ was released by the company Swanson in 1954, and the connections have become more enmeshed ever since. In the 1960s and 1970s, food personalities like Julia Childs and Graham Kerr brought French-style cooking to a US audience, and opened the possibility for decadent deliciousness to grace the family table every weeknight. The Jane Fonda-style wellness culture of the 1980s signalled the possibility of a backlash to such self-indulgence, but this was soon rejected in the early 1990s, with the brazen feasting of Two Fat Ladies. Later in that decade, the establishment in the US of the 24/7 Food Network – with its cornucopia of women hosts – meant eating, television, gender and foodie culture became even more entangled, and even more a part of daily life. On our screens in the early 2000s appeared Ready, Steady, Cook, the seemingly insatiable rise of Martha Stewart, and the first popular websites dedicated to recipes and eating.
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis brought about an apex in food television’s popularity and decadence. Five nights a week, Masterchef gave us a sumptuous visual feast, filled to the brim with lips wrapped around heaped forks – a response to growing, and quite possibly growling, hunger pangs. Perhaps when your eating budget has tipped you into the ‘Prices Are Down, Down, Down’ mystery-meat sausages aisle, Masterchef steps in to satiate that residual need to eat for desire.
This is no mere pop psychology. Like apes, human brains contain neurons that fire when they see another ape or human performing the same action. Unimaginatively referred to as ‘mirror neurons’, this is the scientific explanation for why we experience physical, visceral pleasure from watching other bodies perform acts like yawning, sweating, eating or fucking. And those acts – like the scopophilic and affective pleasure we take in them – are often confused.
Cultural norms mean the body type most likely to fire those mirror neurons is the youthful and feminine body. The fusion of women’s bodies with eating generates an affective feeling of sensual pleasure, which explains the reason why there are more women than men hosts in mukbang, while the audience is less gender skewed. After all, the girl is associated with sugar and spice and all things nice. The mother is associated with the safety and comfort of the home kitchen. The whore – #foodporn star that she is – oozes like soufflé. While satiating a physical and emotional desire related to eating, mukbang simultaneously provides yet another opportunity to partake in the socially sanctioned pleasure of having a youthful feminine body perform solely for your pleasure.
So what, then, is so different about it?
When I first stumbled from the cheat meal chasm into the mukbang abyss, I was convinced that what I was watching was something extreme, something singular, something new. But maybe my shock reaction was actually caused by a sense of déjà vu.
The screen is perhaps the new mediator, a technology that provides novel ways in which we can alter and consume bodies to satiate our thirst. But the relation that sits behind it remains the same. We have long consumed the feminine body in service of our own physical and emotional needs: from nurses and teachers to carers, cleaners and sex workers, our economy is a degustation of service bodies in womanly form.
Mukbang’s emergence from the fire of the global financial crisis and wellness culture’s denial aesthetic may well be a rejection of our seemingly imminent return to the #paleo days of eating solely for survival. Because we can still remember what it’s like to gorge with pleasure. And – in a painfully familiar ritual of consumption as old as time itself – we’re willing to achieve it through the cost of virgin sacrifice.
