YouTube hell “Mukbang”: eating videos as brain massage and disgust experience

Simone Meier

Everything is better with food, absolutely everything, including Switzerland, the Bible and love – from “Mini Chuchi, dini Chuchi” (SRF) to “The Last Supper” (Leonardo da Vinci) to the dinner dating show “First Dates”. But whether we are in “MasterChef” or “Kitchen Impossible”, in the “Landfrauenküche” or Sir Oliver Baroni’s reconstruction of the most horrible TikTok recipes – everything is always very civilized.

Elsewhere it is different. South Korea, the country that always provides cinematic innovations and surprises and has celebrated global successes in recent years with, among others, ‘Parasite’ and ‘Squid Game’, invented mukbang more than fifteen years ago. The term consists of “mokta” (food) and “bangsong” (sending) and therefore precisely and simply means “food broadcast”. What started as a celebration of Korean food on internet TV channels has grown into a multi-sensory experience on YouTube and TikTok. And Mukbang celebrates exactly one thing: absolute gluttony. The grotesque exaggeration. It is humanly impossible to stuff a lot of food into yourself.

South Korean and other Asian mukbangers are characterized by being slim, beautiful, athletic (the men) and snow-white-ethereal (the women). Take one of the recent videos from Sulgi Yang, 29, who has 13.4 million YouTube subscribers.

Sulgi tells a little story: she rearranges her small all-white apartment, she wears a delicate white dress, she tenderly polishes several YouTuber trophies she has won. Then she stands in her miniature kitchen, washing mushrooms (which, as we all know, you are not allowed to do), preparing vegetables, her kitchen interior is a feast of product placement and insinuating sounds, because Mukbang is an ASMR phenomenon, every sound There is believed to have a direct impact on us. The nervous system is translated and physically felt. Brain massage.

There is no background noise, the sound is perfectly focused on the short, dull resistance and the very slight squeak when cutting the oyster mushrooms, on the cheerful sizzle of the bacon in the pan, on the coming together of grainy and liquid components when mixing of sauces, which sounds like a wave rolling over shell gravel. And at Sulgi’s whisper. I don’t know why you have to whisper when you talk about cooking, but it has its effect, a whispering voice sounds more humid than a normal voice, it is closer to your taste buds, it makes your mouth water, and it is more intimate to you too . The physical experience of mukbang is said to be similar to that of pornography.

Sulgi’s sauces and marinades are russet and red – the redder and oranger the food, the more popular the video, as Mukbang junkie Stefanie Sargnagel knows in her fantastic new book “Iowa”, color also creates sensory stimuli and is part of the ASMR experience . Vegetables, shrimps, various sausages, chunky slices of bacon, noodles and rice cakes, mostly fried, are dyed red until they shine appetizingly and are aesthetically draped on a huge platter. It fills half the screen. It is intended to remind a young, urbanized audience living in small or single households of their childhood, when many different dishes were placed in the center of the table. And so, in the isolation turbo of the pandemic, mukbang videos have tripled, Sargnagel says.

And then Sulgi eats. Almost everything. She doesn’t have to gag and doesn’t seem to swallow too much, she does it elegantly and with pleasure. Sulgi neutralizes all the fat with a hearty bite to a particularly hot chili. The cinematographer still gets some of it, leading to lengthy praise for Sulgi’s humanity in the comment columns. Her blouse remains white, only the small mouth on her white face looks more and more like that of a vampire.

She slaps her lips, slurps, chews in ever new nuances. It’s amazing how different the bite of oyster or enoki mushrooms sounds, how different the juicy crunch of the different types of sausage is, how endlessly tasty the different crackling and cracking breadcrumbs sound, that’s right Lust – if it weren’t for the perversely large amount . You inevitably think of the live experiments in “Jackass.” Or the pointless food festivities for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records.

There’s only one thing Sulgi doesn’t do: she doesn’t swallow anything. Except drinks. It has long been suspected that Sulgi and people like her even more successful colleague Zach Choi (37), with 25.4 million followers on YouTube, do not eat the enormous amounts of food, but spit it out. The way Sulgi’s videos are edited would be easy. She has filmed 770 of these videos since 2019, so she would have to consume 770 times her daily calorie needs, a record like that of Sulgi plus drinks from the Coca-Cola group (they are always easily recognizable). calories. Zach Choi has made 1,176 videos since 2018. He is the man for the rough work. He eats a huge steak with a portion of cheese and mashed potatoes, enough for at least six people.

However, Zach Choi and Sulgi Yang both seem extremely healthy, the cheating is practically written all over their fit bodies. Their imitators in the US, on the other hand, are usually very overweight people who, in their mukbang videos, refuse with all their might and against the advice of all doctors to be prohibited from eating. Eating as a challenging, tragic form of so-called self-care. Unlike Zach and Sulgi’s columns, which are full of raves, those of overweight people are overflowing with hate and contempt. The result: even more massive protest dinners.

Mukbanger More Nikocado asks for a video: “I weigh 399.9 pounds. Will I finally weigh 400 pounds after this meal? He owes us the answer. But one thing is clear: unlike Sulgi and Zach, he sees himself as an authentic mukbanger.

A few days ago, the German Federal Center for Nutrition sounded the alarm about the increasing Mukbang wave, the invitation to eating disorders was excessive and as a result of the videos there was both a ‘reduced’ and an ‘increased’ food intake. So people who replace their own consumption with videos, and at the same time feed their own aversion to food and become anorexic, and others who are inspired to imitate it and become overweight or bulimia.

By the way, in 2019 a scandal shook the grotesque world of Mukbang. YouTuber Ssoyoung (10.6 million subscribers) ate a live octopus that desperately clung to her face with its tentacles. Animal welfare was turned upside down. Shortly afterwards she ate a whole burnt pig’s head. South Korea was shocked, the preparation was a slap in the face for a proud food nation. Ssoyoung apologized and to this day still bravely eats his way through mountains of food that are shiny red or gold. Allegedly.