Still image from a 2017 mukbang
5 July 2023
Mukbang is a genre of online video that features a person eating, usually copious amounts of food. The genre got its start in South Korea, and the word is blend of the Korean 먹 (muk, “eat”) + 방 (bang, clipped from 방송, bangsong “broadcast”).
Mukbangs vary in format. Some have one person eating, others have two or more. Some of the diners talk and comment on the food, others simply eat. Some videos focus on the food, with only portions of the diners’ bodies appearing. Some eat politely, and others, often the most popular, voraciously and messily gobble down the food. Some focus on the sound of eating, providing an ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) experience.
Mukbangs started appearing on the South Korean video streaming service AfreecaTV in 2009, quickly becoming popular in that country and spreading to other streaming services, such as YouTube. The genre started gaining popularity globally in the mid 2010s. The word starts appearing in English language texts in 2015. London’s Sunday Times had this on 8 February 2015:
Word of the week: Mukbang
From the land that gave us Gangnam Style, the next big thing is Koreans Do Lunch. Mukbang is a combination of the words for eating and broadcasting. Just film yourself eating—the more flamboyantly you do it, the better—and post the results. For a magnificent example of the genre, see tinyurl.com/MukbangMan
And the same paper had mukbangers, referring to those making the videos, on 12 April 2015:
Mukbangers Mukbang is broadcast eating. Come dinnertime, young South Koreans like to tune into amateur “eating shows,” watching people work their way through plates of dumplings.
The word made its appearance on Urbandictionary.com on 15 April 2016:
“Mukbang” is an internet fad that finds viewers watching mukbangers binge eating copious amounts of food. This strange trend began in Korea in 2011. The term “mukbang” comes from a mix of two Korean words, “muk-ja” (eating) and “bang-song” (broadcasting). The most popular mukbang stars (also called “BJs” for broadcast Jockeys) eat messy foods as they loudly slurp, chomp and display bad table manners.
I told my YouTube subscribers I would make thirty mukbang videos in thirty days, but I think that may be too many, so I will only do a mukbang every other day.
Sources:
Buchanan, Daisy. “The Fashion Capital of Cool.” Sunday Times (London), 12 April 2015, Style 32. Gale Primary Sources: The Sunday Times Historical Archive.
“Going Viral.” Sunday Times (London), 8 February 2015, News Review 4.10. Gale Primary Sources: The Sunday Times Historical Archive.
Urbandictionary.com, 15 April 2016, s.v. mukbang, n. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Mukbang
Photo credit: 장파 (Jangpa), 2017. Still from a YouTube mukbang. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.