Mukbang, on the surface, it seems so easy to misunderstand.

Someone eats on camera. Sometimes they eat alone. Sometimes they eat enormous quantities. Sometimes there are amplified sounds, close-up textures, noodles being lifted, fried food being cracked open, soup being stirred, a table filled with more food than one person would usually need. To someone outside the genre, it can look excessive, strange, even uncomfortable. But food rituals are rarely simple from the outside.

Mukbang originally emerged in South Korea as a form of digital companionship, shaped by a world in which more people were living alone, working irregular hours and eating by themselves. Yet it would be too reductive to describe its beginnings as lonely people passively watching someone else eat. Early livestreamed mukbang was interactive. Viewers participated through live chat, influenced the conversation, sent digital gifts and helped shape the atmosphere of the meal. The host did not simply eat while the audience watched, but rather, the meal was made between them. Mukbang did not originally replace the shared meal, but it expanded who could participate in one, and what participation itself could mean.

Eating together, differently.

Shared meals are among the oldest social rituals we have. They communicate belonging, care, status, hospitality, family, friendship, identity and community. A table is never only a table. It is a structure through which people learn where they belong, who feeds whom, who waits, who serves, who speaks, who is included, who is absent.

Anthropologists use the word commensality to describe eating together, but the phrase can sound too clean for something so emotionally dense. Eating together can mean intimacy, obligation, comfort, performance, negotiation, silence, love, power and memory, sometimes all within the same meal. 

Mukbang creates a digital form of commensality. A viewer may eat alongside the creator, follow the rhythm of the meal, listen to the same sounds, watch the same sequence of dishes and feel a kind of company. Some people watch for appetite. Some for comfort. Some for food discovery. Some for the sensory pleasure of sound, colour and texture. Some for entertainment. Some, perhaps, for the reassurance of another person eating when they are eating alone. There is unlikely to be one universal reason. That is precisely why the genre deserves more care than it often receives.

For some viewers, mukbang may stimulate appetite. For others, it may offer a way to experience abundance without physically consuming the food themselves. For others, it may provide a form of controlled companionship, where the viewer can choose when to enter, whether to interact and when to leave, experiencing familiarity and presence without giving up the autonomy of eating alone. But solitude and sociality are not opposites here, they coexist in the same place.

Appetite is not only taste.

Mukbang also reminds us that appetite is profoundly multisensory. Taste is only one part of eating. We also consume anticipation, sound, colour, texture, repetition, abundance, gesture and the visible pleasure of another person enjoying food. A crisp sound can become part of the meal. The stretching of cheese, the shine of sauce, the steam rising from noodles, the rhythm of chewing, the arrangement of dishes across a table, all of these can produce desire before taste is ever involved. This is one of the reasons food travels so powerfully online.

A dish can become desirable before it is eaten. A sound can create appetite. A texture can become famous. A sauce can become recognisable through the way it moves on camera. Food becomes visual, acoustic and social before it becomes physical.

That shift feels very contemporary, but it also draws on something ancient. People have always watched other people eat. Children learn appetite by watching adults. Families pass on manners, desire and disgust at the table. Markets, festivals, religious feasts, street food, wedding meals and banquets have always made food visible before it is consumed. The screen has intensified the social life of appetite.

Electronic pickles.

There is a Chinese expression I find very revealing: dianzi zhacai, often translated as “electronic pickles.”

Just as preserved vegetables might accompany a simple bowl of rice, digital content accompanies the meal and makes it feel more engaging. I love this phrase because it does not treat the screen as a poor substitute for company. It treats it as another component of the meal. The video becomes a condiment, something eaten beside the food, not physically, but sensorially and emotionally.

This captures something many people recognise but may not always name. Someone may eat physically alone while watching a creator, listening to a podcast, scrolling through comments, sending a message, or following a conversation online. The meal is solitary in one sense, but not entirely private. It is connected to a wider rhythm of digital presence.

The experience can continue after the meal too, through shared jokes, clips, comments, reactions and online discussion. A person may eat alone at home while still participating in a larger cultural conversation about food.

From companionship to spectacle.

As mukbang travelled across cultures, it expanded. It became entertainment, ASMR, food discovery, spectacle and, in some cases, a test of physical endurance. The most visually dramatic version often became the most recognisable: enormous portions, intensified sounds, increasingly extreme formats, tables covered with food and a creator’s body placed at the centre of the performance.

Conversational or sensory eating broadcasts are not the same as the “big stomach king” format associated with vast quantities and endurance eating. They belong to the same broad digital family, but they do not do the same cultural work.

Some mukbang is intimate, quiet and companionable, while some is theatrical, culinary, comedic, extreme or simply sensory. The risk is assuming that the most exaggerated version of a genre explains the whole thing.

Who has authority over food now?

Mukbang also shows how culinary authority has changed.

For a long time, authority around food was held by chefs, critics, restaurants, cookbooks, institutions, magazines, guides, families and traditions. These still matter, but they no longer hold the whole field. Digital creators and their audiences can now influence which foods receive attention, which dishes generate desire, which textures become famous and which restaurants or products become commercially successful.

You can see this shift very clearly in the way mukbang creators appear within wider food media. In Culinary Class Wars, for example, mukbang creators took part in a restaurant challenge where their purchasing decisions helped determine which dishes succeeded. That is a remarkable sign of where food culture has moved. Taste is no longer authorised only by the chef, the critic or the institution. It is also shaped by creators, audiences, platforms and the collective appetite of the internet.

Food culture is democratised, and feels more dispersed. 

More democratic in some ways, more commercial in others, more chaotic, more immediate, more vulnerable to spectacle, but also more open to forms of authority that traditional food culture once ignored.

Abundance on camera.

Mukbang changes the way abundance circulates. Food consumed by one creator can be displayed to millions of viewers, replayed, clipped, commented upon and monetised. The creator physically consumes the food, while the audience receives sensory stimulation, familiarity, entertainment, information or vicarious satisfaction. This is exactly where the genre becomes more complicated.

Abundance has always been socially meaningful. A full table can signify celebration, prosperity, generosity, care, excess or status. In mukbang, abundance is not only shared with the people physically present. It is broadcast, multiplied and turned into content as the platform rewards visibility.

Larger portions, more dramatic sounds, more unusual combinations and more intensified performances can generate more attention. In the attention economy, appetite becomes something to stage.

This does not mean mukbang is inherently harmful. It is too diverse for that kind of judgement, and many creators engage with food in ways that are joyful, communal, humorous, educational or comforting. But the extreme forms reveal something about what platforms often reward: more quantity, more intensity, more spectacle, more bodily risk, more proof. Food becomes content, while appetite becomes performance and the body becomes part of the format.

The body under the performance.

This is the most uncomfortable part of the genre, and I think it needs to be approached carefully.

The creator’s body can become part of the spectacle. In some forms of mukbang, creators may be rewarded for displaying excess while also facing pressure to maintain a socially desirable appearance. This produces a striking tension between the performance of abundance and the management of the body.

A recent video by Daojing examined the case of Douyin mukbang creator Jennifer Zi, reporting that she underwent repeated liposuction while continuing to produce eating content. The case is unsettling not because it should be used to condemn one individual, but because it reveals something larger about the creator economy.

A person may be commercially rewarded for presenting seemingly limitless consumption while simultaneously feeling pressure to ensure that the body does not visibly reflect it. That contradiction is not only personal, but it is structural.

The broader question is not simply what one creator chose to do. It is what the platform rewards, what audiences expect, what bodies are allowed to look like, and how digital food culture can commodify not only appetite, but the appearance that appetite has no consequences. This is where body image, commerce and entertainment become tightly entangled.

It is also where we have to resist simplistic judgement. Creators are not symbols. They are people working inside systems that often reward contradiction. A culture can celebrate visible abundance while still demanding bodily control. That is not unique to mukbang. It is present across fashion, wellness, fitness, restaurants, social media, advertising and everyday life. Mukbang makes the contradiction harder to ignore.

Why this belongs in a food conversation.

It may be tempting to place mukbang outside “serious” food culture, as though it belongs only to the internet and not to the study of eating.

Mukbang sits at the intersection of solitude, entertainment, appetite, body image, sensory pleasure, commerce and digital connection. It shows us how old human needs move into new formats. People rarely eat only to satisfy hunger.

We eat for comfort, identity, memory, status, pleasure, belonging, distraction, care, rebellion, routine and reassurance. We eat with others, for others, against others, in front of others, because of others. Sometimes we eat alone and still want the feeling of company. Sometimes we want abundance without the physical act of abundance. Sometimes we want to watch someone else enjoy what we may not be eating ourselves.

Mukbang translates these very old needs into a digital, global and highly commercial form. It shows that the shared meal is changing, and that companionship no longer depends only on physical presence.

What Kurami takes from this.

At Kurami, we think about food as more than nutrition, because food is never received by the body alone. It is received by the senses, the imagination, the nervous system, the memory and the day around it. The way food looks, the care with which it is prepared, the rhythm it gives to someone’s week, the feeling of being accompanied by a meal rather than abandoned to another decision, all of this matters.

Mukbang, in a very different way, also shows that people are often seeking more than food itself. They are seeking rhythm, presence, appetite, discovery, reassurance, sensory pleasure and some form of company.

That does not mean a video can replace the intimacy of a shared table, or that digital companionship is uncomplicated. It means that modern eating has become stretched across new spaces: the kitchen, the phone, the platform, the comment section, the solitary desk lunch, the late-night screen, the restaurant challenge, the viral clip. Food culture has always changed with technology. Think of the impact of fire, the table, or even restaurants and tv. 

Mukbang is one expression of that change. It asks us to look again at what people are really hungry for when they watch someone else eat.

FAQs

What is mukbang?

Mukbang is a genre of eating broadcast that began in South Korea, where hosts eat while interacting with viewers. It has since expanded globally into entertainment, ASMR, food discovery, sensory eating videos and more extreme large-quantity formats.

Why do people watch mukbang?

People watch mukbang for different reasons, including companionship, appetite stimulation, sensory pleasure, entertainment, food discovery, relaxation, ASMR, comfort or vicarious satisfaction. There is unlikely to be one universal motivation.

Did mukbang start because people were lonely?

Mukbang is often linked to solo dining, people living alone and changing work patterns in South Korea, but it should not be reduced to lonely people watching someone eat. Early mukbang was interactive, with viewers participating through live chat, conversation and digital gifts.

What is digital commensality?

Digital commensality refers to forms of eating together that happen through digital media rather than physical presence. Mukbang can create a mediated sense of shared eating, where viewers eat alongside a creator, follow the rhythm of the meal or experience company through the screen.

Is mukbang harmful?

Mukbang is a diverse genre, so it should not be described as inherently harmful. Some forms are conversational, sensory, comforting or food-focused, while more extreme formats can raise concerns around excess, body image, platform pressure and the commercialisation of appetite.

What does mukbang reveal about food culture?

Mukbang reveals that eating is never only about hunger. It shows how food can become companionship, entertainment, sensory experience, commerce, body performance and digital ritual. It also shows how technology is changing the meaning of eating together.