The Mukbang is a viral social media phenomenon that has been in the global virtual zeitgeist for more than a decade. As simple or mundane as it may seem, this popular trend has seen an explosion in popularity throughout the world.
Stemming from South East Asia, mainly South Korea, this trend has taken the world by storm and has then persisted as a genre of videos on popular social media sites like YouTube and Instagram for years. Creators from across the world make videos of them eating food and upload them to be viewed by a truly cross-cultural, global audience.
In 2016, the popular streaming website Twitch introduced a separate category called “social-eating” to incorporate the burgeoning trend as a separate genre on their website.
But what does the “Mukbang” mean, what are its roots, and why has it proven to be so popular online across the globe?
Mukbang is a combination of two words from the Korean language- namely meongneun and bangsong. These translate to “eating” and “broadcast” respectively. Translated to English, the word Mukbang equates to “eatcast”.
The sheer popularity of the phenomenon can be gauged by the fact that in 2020, Collins Dictionary had shortlisted the word for its word of the year competition.
As the translation of the word reveals, Mukbang is when someone records or streams themselves eating food.
The Mukbang entered the world of social media through AfreecaTV. Having nothing to do with the African continent, AfreecaTV is actually a South Korean streaming website that transmits TV channels, allows for individual creators to upload their own videos, has discussion boards, and also has live chat.
This amalgamation of services provided fertile ground for the Mukbang to explode into existence. This form of broadcast started making its way onto the website around 2009. This early iteration of the Mukbang had a lot to do with AfreecaTV’s functionality. In these transmissions, the Broadcast Jockey (the popular term for creators on AfreecaTV) would cook and eat the food.
Unlike most cooking shows, however, the emphasis is more on the eating rather than the cooking portion of the meal. This proved to garner a large amount of interest as people began to interact with the creators through online chatrooms. Audience members suggested what they could eat and what kind of food combinations they could try. The demand for these streams began to rise and people began to donate online towards these creators along with their suggestions and requests.
Low production costs and high demand for this kind of content led to more creators doing Mukbangs. The phenomenon then spread to other social media sites and creators began to record and upload Mukbangs in the Western World as well.
Where most other genres across video platforms required excitement and had difficulty retaining viewership for more than a few minutes, people would often watch Mukbangs patiently for long periods of time. Longer videos were more popular in the Mukbang category and thus proved profitable for creators.
The Mukbang was thence able to transcend cultural bounds and become a truly global phenomenon.
The most popular answer to this question is to alleviate loneliness. Eating alone has become the new norm in most of the modern world with people moving towards more isolated, less social forms of existence.
Especially in large cities, people live in apartments, and despite the densely packed populations, they have put aside real-world interactions preferring the online world to the real one. Due to this modernization and isolation, it is easier for people to be more introverted and crave the social satisfaction of eating with people-and Mukbang fulfils that role. According to a study conducted by the University of Seoul (Korea), Mukbangs are good at alleviating the feelings of loneliness associated with eating alone.
Another reason associated with the popularity of the genre are people wanting to satisfy cravings by living vicariously through the Mukbanger. It could also be that some people like watching attractive individuals eat. This could explain the fact that, traditionally, famous Mukbangers are attractive young women.
Mukbangs became incredibly popular in Korea because they contrast with traditional eating ettiquette. Most Korean people would traditionally espouse discipline, sensibility and respect when participating in the act of eating food.
However, Mukbangs generally consist of attractive young women eating bizarre amounts of fast-food or seafood- a strange juxtaposition against the historic and traditional Korean attitude towards eating food.
The westernization of the Korean culture and social media, loneliness associated with modern living, and the intrigue provided with traditionally fit people eating large quantitities of calorically dense food were the main reasons for the popularity and proliferatiin of this genre in South Korea.
As mundane as the act of eating seems, it has proven to be a popular genre in modern social media.
This reflects perhaps the loneliness of the modern man and the need for us to look more towards healthier relationships with food and with other people that were more of the norm in the past.
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