Twitch’s streamers are eating their fill and then heading in for seconds. The streaming service best known as a hub for video game content has launched a new Social Eating category, on which creators can broadcast themselves as they consume large quantities of food and chat with their viewers.
The social eating phenomenon has not yet taken off in the US, though some creators, such as Daym Drops, have found an audience by chowing down on screen. In Korea, however, social eating is known as “muk-bang,” and it is a popular phenomenon. One of the more popular muk-bang personalities, Banzz, has more than 867,000 subscribers and over 325 million views on his YouTube channel.
Some viewers watch muk-bang videos to satisfy themselves when they’re on a diet; others are seduced by sex appeal of certain social eaters. The authenticity of the muk-bang category is also a big selling point. “Eating is something one activity that is strongly identified as being natural, and spontaneous,” said Kyung Kim, a professor of East Asian studies at the University of California at Irvine, in a 2015 muk-bang profile published by NPR. “You think about K-pop or K-drama [and] they’re very artificial, they’re all about makeup and plastic surgeries. And a lot of people find this —mukbang — to be the exact opposite of all the things right now Korean popular culture really stands for.”
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Twitch’s decision to allow social eating streams represents a reversal of the platform’s previous policy, which explicitly prohibited muk-bang videos. Already, several creators have accepted Twitch’s invite by dining on stream. To see what they’re cooking up, head over to the Social Eating category hub.
