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How far will someone push themselves to be big in the mukbang community? (Credit: YouTube)
Not long before she died, Pan Xiaoting was rushed to hospital. The morbidly obese 24-year-old “influencer” had gastrointestinal bleeding from an eating challenge, one of many she livestreamed to thousands of fans. Undaunted, though, she was back at the table days later, promising her followers that she would eat 10kg of food in one sitting. The stomach tear which then killed her live on air was inevitable.
What made a young woman eat herself to death in front of legions of viewers? One word: Mukbang. Korean for “eating broadcast”, it’s a trend which slithered out of the early 2010s and has ballooned into popular culture. These videos were an amalgamation of YouTube’s favourite genres: routines (“get ready with me”; “what I eat in a day”), ASMR (splurpy, sizzly, crunchy textural noises), unboxing (testing and reviewing products) and food porn (self-explanatory). They are by turns horrifying and awe-inspiring — often featuring pretty, young Asian women with doll-like makeup slurping up some pretty nauseating victuals. The videos are, inevitably, saturated with pornographic imagery.
For young women, there is a morbid fascination in watching people devour huge quantities of the worst kind of food; I’ll regularly wake up on a hungover Sunday morning to watch Becki Jones and Abby Taylor Bannigan put away three McDeliveries as the kettle boils. It is a sort of liberating abandon for those of us who instinctively look to restrict our diets. My most intense period of viewing was in my first year of university when, limp from my own eating issues, I would lie in bed salivating over videos of cheese, potatoes, cakes, cookies, burgers. That’s the thing about denying yourself food: it is guaranteed to become your primary fixation. Hence the escalating popularity of mukbang; it is deeply rooted in our eating-disordered culture, fuelled by the thrilling sacrilege of bingeing for complex-ridden teenagers. Girls who once trawled Tumblr for Kate Moss quotes now stare through their fingers at TikToks by Plus Size Park Hoppers, who visit the restaurants of Disneyland trying to squeeze into the seats. The flip side is, if anything, more enticing — with genuinely anorexic creators and emaciated models aggressively promoting “clean eating” and sending scores of followers towards recovery clinics.
There is more to mukbang, though, than just teenagers being weird about food. Something different, something supercharged, something powerful enough to set the scene for the death of an otherwise healthy 24-year-old. To find out what’s driving it, just follow the money. Ad revenue from YouTube, or earnings from TikTok’s creator fund, are notoriously low — and ordering all those takeaways is expensive. So who’s footing the bill?
Who else, but horny men with a fat fetish. The internet is awash with “feeder” culture, to the extent that the specialist forum Feabie.com terms it “a sexual orientation, sorta like being straight or bi”. Feeder, as you might have guessed, encourage — or force — “feedees” to eat to the point of immobility or death. Even more extreme versions of feederism involve “vore”: that is, partners eating one another, performing a sort of sadistic obliteration of identity. And these bizarre, hardcore fetishes filter back down into mainstream mukbang: one particularly challenging video I watched was of a women shovelling live octopuses into her mouth, prising tentacles from her face with chopsticks as they fought being gobbled up.
Fetish communities have existed on the fringes since Adam met Eve. But the line between mainstream internet content and gnarlier sex stuff is disappearing: Twitter is awash with OnlyFans models replying to every viral post, while Facebook is flooded with weird “cooking” videos which are Trojan-horsing fetishes into clips your nan might share. And within the mukbang world, men are paying young food bloggers to produce pornified content. If you can treble the revenue from an eating clip by throwing in phrases like “I can feel myself getting bigger…”, why wouldn’t you? It’s a quick, if stomach-churning, way to earn a lot of money.
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SubscribePoppy Sowerby is becoming one of my favorite Unherd authors. She has a sharp wit and introduces me to aspects of life I never knew, or imagined, existed. In some cases, such as the subject of the current article, I probably didn’t want to know they existed, but there’s no point hiding from life. Her articles also provide light relief, or at least a distraction, from my usual fare of articles about global politics and just how bad the world would be under a Harris presidency.
Full disclosure: I googled Pan Xiaoting and was directed to a short video with the title “Pan Xiaoting live death.” I closed the browser. Despite a certain morbid interest in Pan Xiaoting, I recognized that a young, healthy woman died needlessly due to binge eating. I’m not particularly principled, but some things shouldn’t be watched, imo.
I totally agree. It’s nice to actually be able to laugh at an article (and still be deeply concerned), instead of just being deeply concerned like I am with the majority of the other articles and news stories.
I would question whether we can call Pan Xiaoting ‘healthy’. Healthy also means you can mange and have a meaning full life (whatever that means) within your circumstances
I got half way through and decided that there are now quite a few things about our modern world I don’t need to know, and would be happier if I remained unaware of their existence.
The words ‘mukbang’, ‘food porn’ and the author’s picture and name somehow made me skip straight to the comments: thanks for confirming my hunch.
Oh Allen. Don’t be an old dry balls. After replying to you I’m going on to Feabie.com and will report back.
Oh dear. They wanted all sorts of information so I decided not to join … “No matter what your criteria are, we’ve got a search for it: Age, location, weight, BMI, sexual kinks and preferences, body type, languages spoken, relationship status, etc. Don’t wait any longer to find the feeder, feedee , BBW or BHM of your dreams. ” What is a BBW or a BHM ?
I had to stop reading half way through. I don’t need to know certain things.
My question to the author would be, you know that waking up every Sunday morning with a hangover is not good for you, nor is denying yourself food (to look skinny?) yet, with all the awareness you appear to show here, you seem to lack self awareness. Why?
Pan Xioating, known online as “300斤胖媳妇•幸福生活 or “400 pound fat wife•happy life”, did not actually suffer the explosive death that has been widely rumoured and reported but had actually just taken a break in broadcasting to give birth.
There’s a cheerful woman from the midlands called Leah Shutkever who does food challenges on Youtube. Most people would need an ambulance after eating what she crams in. Yet she has an apparently healthy, gym-fit body. So perhaps you can do it safely if you really insist on doing it.
“Yet she has an apparently healthy, gym-fit body.”
As you may know, competitive eaters have long been a thing in the US. They often perform at state fairs and the like. Typically they are slim and athletic. They do, indeed, train by gradually building up their eating ability and, so I’ve read, stretching their stomachs with more and more food. From what I’ve read, they receive medical supervision.
Poppy is certainly a competent writer, but I’m still not sure what the point of it is. Is it supposed to be “relatable” when she drops in things like “WE have all become deliciously complicit in this spectacle“? No we haven’t.
She’s like someone who has voluntarily decided to live in a dung heap describing at great length how awful the smell is. Why should we care?
I suspect it’s to try to enhance the appeal of Unherd to a wider audience, i.e. those who might care.
No pun intended by “wider”, I assume…
Pointless article about online fetishes. Like those podcasters constantly going on about “The View”. I wouldn’t know that execrable show existed if it wasn’t constantly being referred to.
Whatever one’s kink, it’s best kept to oneself.
“What made a young woman eat herself to death in front of legions of viewers?” Stupidly.
Yes, yes I know it’s more complicated than that. I’ve spent many hours diving down emotional rabbit holes with similarly affected friends. Trying to help. Did it work? No. Do I care? Of course. Do I have time to care now? No. I need a shorthand. Stupidly will do.
I thought initially that mukbang might be an example of onomatopoeia, but what’s the word for something that is spelled just as revolting as that which it describes?
There are those who believe that the advent of cyberculture and its monetary compensations have eliminated the concept of natural selection. I was unaware of this manifestation of its continued effects, but however dispiriting the discovery, it caused no surprise.
This is quite an interesting article, but it really ought to have started by explaining that the Korean conventions around eating that gave rise to Mukbang are based on a cultural conviction that eating is a social activity and should not be done alone.
The internet and videoconferencing made it possible for people to eat together virtually even when physically separated, and this took off in a big way for Koreans. Mukbang is an evolution of something that was originally warm, human and civilised, even if what it is now seems to include a bunch of people behaving like pigs.
Anyone even tempted to emulate this obsessive behavior should get to an Overeaters Anonymous meeting ASAP if you want to save your life.