I generally think of myself as digitally savvy. I’m not quite up with the young people, on SnapChat or whatever, but I know it exists. Mukbang, however, I did not even know existed. Now I do, and it turns out that it is just videos of people eating a lot of food on a live video screen.
It’s not a food challenge thing, although they do usually eat a lot of food. It’s more of a live, interactive experience. They have a chatroom and people ask them questions. It originated in South Korea but lots of other people seemed to have jumped on the bandwagon.
Why are they doing this? One theory is that it fills a feeling of loneliness. At the end of the above video, the host says “I hope you enjoyed the food” as if we had been at a dinner party with her. Which is basically what we did:
I think I will happily go back to just the three of us, but then, I’m not really the target audience.
Spicy noodle challenge
While the concept of mukbang seems relatively mainstream, an offshoot of it has taken it to almost fetish levels: spicy noodle challenges. Video sites are floodest with mostly young women eating really spicy noodles, presumably so the viewer can watch them suffer.
Footnotes
Thanks to 지식테이너김승훈 for the title image.
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Tags: mukbang, south korea
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2018 at 11:00 am and is filed under Distractions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.