A few years ago, when Sabari Kumar, a 28-year-old doctor, was studying medicine in Ukraine, he chanced upon some binge-eating YouTube channels where all people seemed to be doing was consuming outrageous amounts of food.
These binge-eating videos are known as mukbang, a trend that started in South Korea in 2010, but has since migrated across the world. The word is a portmanteau of "Muk-ja" (eating), and "bang-song"(broadcast).
Google Trends data for India showed that the term "mukbang" became three times more popular on Google search and YouTube between 2018-19.
Inspired by these videos, Kumar and his father R Porchezhiyan, 60, started a YouTube channel called "Saapattu Raman" in 2018. They are popular on the internet for their eating challenges that include eating four kg of jackfruit in seven minutes, 50 omelettes in 18 minutes, or 50 spicy chicken lollipops and five eggs in under ten minutes.
The father-son duo from village Koogaiyur of Villupuram district of Tamil Nadu has a massive following of 1.26 million subscribers.
"Eating large amounts of food is my father's childhood habit," said Kumar. "When I was growing up, we used to consume a lot of food at every meal of the day. Now we do the same thing for the entertainment of people and they like it too. We enjoy our food with our taste buds while our viewers do so with their eyes."
Other Indian “mukbangers” who have garnered a huge number of followers include Deepika Verma, from Lucknow whose YouTube channel, Foodie Bobby, has more than 49,000 subscribers.
Food Shood with Bijan, a Youtube channel with more than 5,29,000 followers, has Bijan slurping, chewing and relishing Indian delicacies cooked by his mother.
In a paper published in 2020 in the journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, researchers linked mukbang with the increasing loneliness of single Koreans in a digital age. In South Korea, eating is a social activity, but with a growing number of Koreans living alone, many have turned mukbangers, as they film themselves eating for the vicarious pleasure of others.
People like watching mukbangers overeat as it triggers an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)--a calming, pleasurable sensation evoked by certain kinds of audio-visual stimuli.
“These cooking and eating experiences are presented in a way that makes them visually appealing,” said Rathi Jaffer, Director of the Indo-Korea Cultural and Information Centre. "There is a subliminal emotive appeal and one can draw parallels to similar dishes within one’s culinary cultural traditions."
Dae Ryun Chang, Professor of Marketing at Yonsei School of Business, Seoul, believes that for many, mukbang is a vicarious form of gratification.
"For instance, the mukbangers may act as surrogate eaters for those on diets," said Dae. "But why Indians would be interested in Korean mukbang is surprising. It is perhaps the thrill of forbidden fruit in the form of beef or a live whole octopus, which can be quite dangerous, or something very spicy. That is why mukbang is almost akin to ‘food porn,'" he added.
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