Have you heard of the TV shows made for people who love to watch other people eat food?
I recently came across this surprising phenomenon where people watch other people consume a lot of food to get some kind of psychological satiation. It was so difficult to relate to it! Specially when you come from Indian collectivist culture you cannot imagine this kind of pleasure. When I tried to dig deeper into the matter, I came to know about the Korean word called “Mukbangs”, which is a broadcast of shows in which the host eats different delicacies while interacting with the audience. These shows are made with the intention to please the people who are here just to enjoy how someone cherishes his food. The most interesting fact about these shows is the sound element. The sound of cutting/biting or tearing the food and chewing it is most pleasure-giving. The shows focus a lot on optimizing these elements of the videos.
What Does Mukbang Mean?
This slang term is used to define the practice of eating a meal online while live broadcasting yourself and interacting with the people who are watching you eat.
online eating shows called ‘mukbang’ i.e.South Korean words for ‘eating’ [‘meokneun’] and ‘broadcast’ [‘bangsong’] that refers to online broadcasts where individuals eat food and interact with the viewers
Why do people enjoy watching others eat?
When some of the individuals who are like to indulge and enjoy watching Mukbangs were asked for the reasons for watching it, they came up with some interesting insights. I have listed them as follows,
1. People who have certain foods prohibited for themselves like for example vegans. They find satisfaction in watching others consume the foods they cannot have. Vegans watching someone have fast food like burgers. Watching someone else cherish the joys that you cannot has a different level of satisfaction and sometimes people watch mukbangs with this intention. This can be interpreted as a ego defense mechanism called as “sublimination” where one uses most subliminal approach to achieve what they want because they cannot directly have it. Sublimation is a defense mechanism that involves channeling unwanted or unacceptable urges into an admissible or productive outlet
2. People with anorexia or eating disorders like to watch others consume which in a way helps them feel less guilty about their own consumption of food. When they see someone eat more food they feel good about themselves for having less or no food at all. This type of reasoning can be interpreted in psychology as a defense mechanism called as “reaction formation”. reaction formation is a defense mechanism in which a person unconsciously replaces an unwanted or anxiety-provoking impulse with its opposite, often expressed in an exaggerated or showy way. While trying to avoid the food and intake related stimuli, the subjects of eating disorders tend to show involvement in watching mukbangs.
3. Third and most researched reason of getting pleasure while watch someone have their food is as simple as loneliness. Just because there is a huge population in the world that lives alone, cooks alone, eats alone. There is also a term coined as single dining in Japan where it is common to see people going out alone for dinners. Choe (2019) theorized that as isolated eating was increasingly commonplace in many regions of the world as well as in South Korea, mukbang provided a sense of social unity for those physically eating alone. Watching mukbang made viewers feel emotionally connected as if they were dining with someone.
There are also some restaurants in Japan where they placed stuff toys and teddy bears on the chairs so as to make the single diner feel accompanied. Turns out it solo diners come together in an online event where they sit together with other solo diners and virtually share the dinner table. Just like online gaming, online dating and online sex, online meals is also gaining importance, thanks to how lonely the society is getting!
Is Mukbang beneficial?
Everything done in excess is a curse and so is the case of being addicted to watching people eat. There is extensive research happening in this area of eating behaviors and eating disorders within the researchers in psychology. According to the study by Kagan K in 2021, mukbang watching appears to have both beneficial consequences like diminishing feelings of loneliness and social isolation, constructing a virtual social community, and non-beneficial consequences such as altering food preferences, eating habits, and table manners, promoting disordered eating, potential excess, and addiction.
References:
Choe, H. (2019). Eating together multimodally: Collaborative eating in mukbang, a Korean livestream of eating. Language in Society, 48(2), 171-208.
Kircaburun, K., Harris, A., Calado, F., & Griffiths, M. D. (2021). The psychology of mukbang watching: A scoping review of the academic and non-academic literature. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 19(4), 1190-1213.
Kircaburun, K., Yurdagül, C., Kuss, D., Emirtekin, E., & Griffiths, M. D. (2021). Problematic mukbang watching and its relationship to disordered eating and internet addiction: a pilot study among emerging adult mukbang watchers. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 19(6), 2160-2169.
Spence, C., Mancini, M., & Huisman, G. (2019). Digital commensality: Eating and drinking in the company of technology. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 2252.
Digital Commensality: Eating and Drinking in the Company of Technology
