Mukbang is a uniquely Korean trend of people getting paid to eat large meals in front of a webcam for a live-streaming broadcast. Mukbang is a word that combines the Korean word for “eat” (muk-da) with the word for “broadcast” (bang song). Mukbang first became popular among niche Korean video-streamers a decade ago. On the popular video broadcasting channel called AfreecaTV, a reported 5% of the programming is mukbang-oriented.
To uninitiated western viewers, modern mukbang seems really weird. Wait a minute, the annual US hotdog champion ( Joey Chestnut) eats 74 hotdogs, the Australian champion eats 64 meat pies. So, maybe it’s not so weird.
The top mukbang and hot dog eating champions can earn as much as $10,000 a month, not including sponsorships. In the US and Australia they compete for prizemoney, The oddest part of the Korean payment structure is that it’s not pay-per-view, ad-based, or salary-based. Rather, ordinary viewers voluntarily send money to their favorite in the form of “star balloons”—a type of proprietary virtual currency that can be bought and sold with regular fiat cash.
If you aren’t familiar with the phenomenon, check out The All American Mukbang, a YouTube video made by Erik the Electric, a 23-year-old from San Diego who has 88,000 YouTube fans. He begins by biting into a 3×3 cheeseburger from In n’ Out and quipping at the camera, “Fitness? Fittin’ this burger in my mouth!” Over the next forty-five minutes, he goes on to eat an impressive menu of tacos, chow mein, hash browns, salad, donuts, potato chips, skippy peanut butter bites, and Ben and Jerry’s Peanut Butter Fudge Core ice cream. And he is making heaps of money.
An Asian-American cultural critic and senior vice president of the global research firm The Futures Company says mukbang had its origins in “the loneliness of unmarried or uncoupled Koreans, in addition to the inherently social aspect of eating in Korea. People watch mukbang so they can pretend to be dining with a friend. A hugely important aspect of mukbang is the noise made while eating: the slurping, chewing, smacking, and swallowing noises. Westerners have been brought up to keep your mouth closed while chewing and no noises during meals from either end.
A typical mukbang episode will have people enumerating the array of food items neatly before them on the table, before eating the food at a leisurely pace. Sometimes it’s large quantities of a single item; fried chicken is a popular mukbang sub-genre. Others, have a spread of seven or eight double-portion dishes.
Bethany Gaskin really loves seafood. She loves seafood so much, in fact, that she films herself sloppily devouring crab legs, lobster tails, and mussels — and, every week, millions of YouTube viewers watch her do it. Her most popular “mukbang” video — 36 minutes and 34 seconds of crab-cracking, lip-smacking, napkin-lacking wonder — has 11.7m views. Gaskin’s viral videos have earned her more than $1m, 1.8m subscribers, and the ability to quit her job.
Soon, Gaskin’s husband, Nate — who was initially skeptical of his wife’s “hobby” — left his job at General Electric to become his wife’s full-time manager. Today, Gaskin’s sons often appear in videos — and, since they also suck the shell out of seafood, they’re perfectly poised to take over the family business.
I wrote a song about a tortilla. Well actually, it’s more of a wrap