Digital Food Talk

Abstract

Watching someone else eat online – a phenomenon which originated in South Korea around the year 2008 (Donnar 2017, 122) – has become a popular video genre around the world. These shows are generally known as Mukbang, with the name reflecting their Korean origin (a blend of the Korean words 먹는, meokneun, 'eating' and 방송, bangsong, 'broadcast'). While the portion size of the consumed foods may vary from show to show and from performer to performer, typical Mukbang feature excessive food consumption and overeating (see section 2.1 for an example). Recently, the extremity of this has led China to censor Mukbang videos on a variety of platforms due to concerns about food waste and food security (Tidy 2020); users in China searching for Mukbang online are now shown a warning notice and some social media companies reacted by blurring the videos to make them less appealing (Tidy 2020). Other criticism concerns the shows' potential involvement in the formation and normalization of eating disorders (see, e.g., Strand and Gustafsson 2020) and internet addiction (Kircaburun et al. 2020). However, Mukbang watching has also been reported to have positive effects on food intake (i.e., encouraging more food intake for groups where this is desirable, or, conversely, preventing binge eating) and to alleviate feelings of loneliness (Strand and Gustafsson 2020, 606). Mukbang are thus a complex phenomenon and their societal impact makes it important to study them in-depth and from various perspectives; nevertheless, linguistic investigations of Mukbang (including subtypes and related genres) remain rare (but cf. Choe 2019; Choe 2020 for Korean-language shows and Rüdiger 2020; Rüdiger 2021 for English-language shows). This paper aims at further filling this gap by approaching this format from the perspective of immediacy and distance. More specifically, despite being produced primarily in the spoken mode, eating shows constitute a fascinating mix of characteristics associated with immediacy and distance (cf. also the notion of 'tertiary orality;' see Heyd, this issue). We will see this in the application of the model of communicative immediacy and distance (Koch and Oesterreicher 1985/2012) and Landert and Jucker's (2011) enriched communicative model to YouTube eating shows later on in this paper. In addition to this modelling (drawing on a corpus of eating shows), the comment replies by eating show performers in the videos' comments sections will also be included in the analysis. First, this paper introduces the eating show genre from the perspective of performative food consumption in general and outlines its development, characteristics, and diversification. Section 3 presents a brief overview of the aforementioned communicative models, which will be applied to the eating shows in the analysis (i.e., Koch and Oesterreicher 1985/2012; Landert and Jucker 2011). Section 4 is then devoted to the methodology and section 5 constitutes the analysis, which is divided into