Everyone gets hungry. A lot of people really don’t want to, many can’t escape it, some are well enough off to only feel vibrations of it, not chasms of pain. But we all deal with it in different ways, some much stranger than others.
I received free lunch in K-12, and grew up eating WIC-provided bags of beans and canned vegetables. TLDR: I have always been working-class. In times when my only guaranteed meal was what I could get from school, I spent my nights crafting ways to calm my stomach until the next day. One of those methods came from overseas: mukbangs. A South Korean term, mukbang translates to “eating and broadcasting” and typically describes a person or persons eating with or without speaking to the audience. This content became mainstream over a decade ago and has since skyrocketed internationally, with the West implementing its own twists to the genre. Nowadays, popular mukbangs showcase exorbitant meals of absurd quantities, messy mouths, and exaggerated reactions. These were the videos that reminded me that food would come, and I watched them frequently when money was tight (and still do).
Why am I so drawn to these videos while hungry? Is it simply because I wish I had food, or is there something else propelling me to watch these displays of wealth? When faced with socioeconomic questions, there are two possible answers:
- It’s Ronald Reagan’s fault.
- It’s a recession indicator.
While both are true in some capacity, I’d like to focus on that second answer.
We are in a recession. It is around us and because of the internet’s sticky hands, you feel it with every click, every purchase, and damn near every step you take. People are poor and are getting poorer. With poverty comes food inequality, followed by chronic hunger, a continuous pain some people are dealing with for the first time. When faced with struggles, we do whatever we can to fix them. A recent booming sensation is Ozempic. While primarily used to lose weight, there is merit in acknowledging that it functions by reducing hunger tremendously. Hunger is so debilitating, so effective at bending will, that thousands of people are eliminating it without a second thought. When surrounded by popular culture that demonizes consumption, it makes sense that society is afraid to be hungry. Popular “What I Eat in a Day” content tests the line between a cry for help and pro-eating disorder propaganda (that is, if the creator isn’t being sponsored by a smoothie line or meal-prep subscription). Scrolling through TikTok, a woman’s video describing “What [she] ate today as a fatty” showed two meals, a dessert, and a smoothie she did not finish. I am not a dietitian nor a health expert, but that type of diet flourishes on the notion that weight is ugly, eating is painful, and cuts are necessary to be satisfied.
Another method takes us back to mukbangs. Hyesu Park, author of Understanding Hallyu, describes the content as simultaneously inducing “the vicarious pleasure of eating and not eating food” (138). Although Park believes this is due to South Korea’s rampant lookism practices, I find her statement can be applied to those who are uncontrollably limited in their nutrition acquisition. Both can be true, of course, but as an American, I escape such severe beauty standards at the cost of worsening income equality. Lucky me.
Does it work? I’d say so, in a backwards way. If my stomach growled too severely to comfortably sleep, mukbangs would attach my hunger to a time frame. Watching this content, I allowed myself ten to twenty minutes to feel that pain without limits. As the creator ate, my stomach relieved itself of its hunger. When the food cleared, so did my pain. Or, at least, I convinced myself it dissipated. Was it a manifestation? Physical empathy? Or was I so desperate for satisfaction that I willed it onto myself? After all, when in pain, people will do whatever they can to alleviate it. May it be unconventional, harmful, or expensive.
Featured image by Sigmund on Unsplash.
