It’s maybe 10 inches long, thick and hard as a rock, and Kim Thai is about to film herself putting the entire thing in her mouth. “This is going to get dirty,” she says eagerly, before eventually toying with it a bit in her hands.
Then she pulls out her scissors. Soon she is mauling the stiff object—a spiky orange king crab leg. After expertly extracting its soft innards with her fingers, she slides them theatrically down her throat. Then she moves on to a crawfish. “You really can’t breathe when you’re sucking,” she observes, slurping liquids from the shell, before smiling for the camera with a glistening ring of juice around her pouty lips.
Kim will continue having her way with this hot red pile of dead crustaceans for 35 minutes and 22 seconds total, slurping, smacking, sucking, and generally putting on a show until all that’s left on her plate is a puddle of bloodred sauce. It’s all free.
The response is immediate. “I’m in love with youuu Kim” comments one person on her YouTube page. Another gushes, “I can’t go a day without watching your videos.” Some, with vague usernames, admit to drooling while watching her. Before long, the clip, which she has titled “King Crab Legs + Shrimp + Crawfish Seafood Boil Mukbang,” has racked up nearly 700,000 views.
Kim, 25, is a born star. And she’s one of the young female influencers taking over a hangry and increasingly lucrative corner of the internet known as mukbang (muck-bong), in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fans eat up videos of women ingesting massive quantities of food. The women are fully clothed. Nothing kinky is happening. But they are very, very into it. “I loooove the sound of cutting into king crab,” says Kim at one point. “Like, ohhhhhhhhh.”
At the end of her video, she encourages her viewers to tune in next time, when she’ll be broadcasting from a hotel—and ordering room service.
Mukbang originated in South Korea around 2010 (right about the same time video-sharing sites and live streaming services took off). There, the mash-up term means eating and broadcasting. But only in the past year have U.S.-based mukbang influencers sucked in increasing numbers of viewers with videos of themselves slurping, chewing, and chomping cartoonish-size portions on camera. Think: dunk-tank-size bowls of ramen, extra-large lobster claws, crab legs the length of a yardstick. Currently, there are tens of thousands of mukbang videos on YouTube and more than a million #Mukbang hashtags on Instagram.
Some feel highly produced, with saturated filters that make the food look practically emoji-like. Others are filmed on the fly in a kitchen or even on a bedroom floor. But there’s one thing the biggest mukbang masterpieces share: seafood.
Take this video of a vlogger named Dorothy eating a king crab that dwarfs her own head (12 million views). Or this nearly 40-minute post by the massively popular mukbang vlogger @BLovesLife, who has nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers, in which she devours a spread of mussels, tiger shrimp, and lobster. It has 3.4 million views—and counting.
Tway Nguyen is a Los Angeles–based restaurant marketing executive who has just under 70,000 subscribers on her channel Twaydabae (she prefers not to reveal her age). “Seafood boils are the most popular request,” she says matter-of-factly. “I think it’s because people like the sounds.” Dryly smacking on a donut just doesn’t have the same appeal nor does it offer the dribbly lip-gloss sheen of lobster juice.
“My seafood mukbangs get the highest reactions, so naturally, that’s what I do the most of,” agrees Kim. “Ninety percent of my requests are for seafood.”
The formula has paid off big for her. Since officially launching her channel, Eat With Kim, last August, the Huntington Beach, California, native has amassed nearly 200,000 subscribers—enough that she was able to quit her job doing social media for a national beauty brand to make mukbang her full-time career. She now films multiple times a week, posting videos with straightforward titles like “Giant 15-Pound Lobster Mukbang,” “Seafood Boil Tower!,” and “King Crab Seafood Boil + Cheese Fondue Fountain.”
“It was a super nerve-racking move and a big leap,” she says. “But looking back, I’m so glad I decided to follow my heart.” Kim now earns six figures a year from her channel, mainly through ads and the occasional sponsorship (she recently partnered with DoorDash and Pepto-Bismol). She serves as the onscreen talent, business manager, social media guru, and creative director of her brand. “I’m doing what I love,” she says. “And to know that my videos are something that people look forward to watching reminds me why I started.”
Some commenters claim to be obsessed with seafood videos because they can’t afford it, don’t have easy access to it, or have dietary restrictions that prevent them from partaking.
But not everyone is living vicariously. “Some people find mukbang to be very sensual—the touching and savoring of food,” explains Makana Chock, PhD, an associate professor at Syracuse University who studies the effects of sexual content in media. “The videos can be sexually stimulating.”
That’s because for some, mukbang gives off an ASMR vibe. Short for autonomous sensory meridian response, ASMR refers to the soothing sensation—often described as a wave of tingles, a pulsing near the scalp, or a euphoric feeling of relaxation—that some people report experiencing in reaction to certain triggers. It’s been called a “brain orgasm.” The phenomenon went viral around 2009 and continues to quietly rage on YouTube, where there is now a healthy economy of ASMR videos (and video influencers). Some of the most popular ones involve soft, amplified sounds like whispering, the squishing of slime, book pages flipping, and finger tapping. A recent Super Bowl ad for Michelob Ultra involved Zoe Kravitz cracking open a beer bottle while speaking softly into a mic. Even Cardi B recorded her own ASMR video, in which she spoke about her career and motherhood in whispers while caressing a rug.
While experts say that ASMR videos are not explicitly sexual, that doesn’t mean viewers don’t see them that way: For some, hearing fingers tap on a mic or the visceral crack of a crab leg or the loud licking of briny butter out of a mussel is a near-pornographic experience. It doesn’t hurt that ASMR artists tend to be women, according to Craig Richard, PhD, a professor at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia, and author of Brain Tingles.
“Some viewers feel sexually aroused when they see a young, attractive person acting in a gentle and kind manner to them in a video,” explains Richard (he quickly adds, “This doesn’t reflect the intention of the ASMR artist”).
At a minimum, ASMR has been proven to be cognitively soothing, he says. And in 2019, when anxiety is at a fever pitch and access to mental health care in short supply, watching someone slowly and enthusiastically masticate a pile of shellfish just might qualify as #SelfCare.
The vlogger BLovesLife, who did not respond to a request for an interview (or confirm her real name), seems to cater explicitly to the ASMR crowd, taking exaggerated gulps of bubbly water, clicking her tongue in her mouth, and promising “not to talk, just eat” while using a chunk of lobster meat to noisily paddle through a bowl of dark brown sauce.
For Kim, it’s just about making her viewers happy—and whether they’re getting, ahem, happy in other ways isn’t really something she dwells on.
“Whatever floats their boat,” she says breezily. “I realize that not everyone comes to me for the same things. Some people are fascinated with how I peel a shrimp and others are curious to hear how something tastes that they’ve never tried before. I’m here to spread love through food.”
But since some people view mukbang as food porn (emphasis on porn), harassing comments are the norm. “I’m not trying to be sexual,” Tway says. “My purpose is to be a source of entertainment. I can’t stop people from viewing my videos in a certain way, but I can block and remove comments that I’m uncomfortable with.” Under one recent Insta post in which she held a long stick of meat near her mouth, she added the caption: “Not another dick joke in the comments pls.”
“How do you eat all of that?” is a common question for mukbang stars—and it isn’t always asked nicely. “Health is a topic that comes up often,” says Kim. “What many people don’t understand is that this is not a binge-eating channel. Mukbang is not about overeating. I almost never finish and always save the leftovers for my brother.”
Tway, too, says that she “hates” overeating.
Indeed, mukbang videos tend to be slow and drawn out—most hover around half an hour or even longer.
“Some of my subscribers are turning on my videos because their partner is working late and dinner is lonely,” says Kim, who always appears upbeat and smiling in her posts. “I’ve become a friend to them. That used to be me. I used to eat alone.”
She had heard about the videos from a close friend, and as she started to film her own, she found they were a great way to share her appreciation of food and her Vietnamese culture. “The first time I ever ate seafood in front of the camera, it was super weird,” she says. “I was nervous about what people were going to think of me, let alone my eating! A lot has changed.” That includes the quality of her videos, which are now shot on professional equipment with good lighting and set against a sterile-white backdrop.
Tway, too, found easy success once she committed to the format. “When I got the hang of doing mukbang videos, it was pretty easy,” she says. “But the one thing I would say is that you’ll realize it’s hard to talk and eat at the same time without looking messy and ugly, so really try to talk between your bites.”
Erika Cole, 36, a customer service representative for a health-care company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, watched mukbang videos by BLovesLife and others before launching her own channel, Eat Eat With E, a few months ago. “When I first saw these videos—there was so much food, people eating carelessly—I thought it was so weird,” she says. “But then I read the comments and realized you could really make someone’s day by posting a video. All you had to do was record yourself eating and you could make a living! I thought to myself, I can do that!”
So far, a video she posted of herself eating 11 deep-fried lobster tails in one sitting hovers near 14,000 views—which is not enough to quit her day job. But she was just able to monetize for the first time and is “excited to see her earnings” start trickling in.
Tway, meanwhile, is considering expanding into a new niche she hopes to create herself: mukbang mixed with fitness. Meaning, her page would include workout videos too. “I don’t want to be limited by one thing,” she says. She would be the very first muk-ness (well-bang?) influencer.
Kim’s “online family” tells her they want her to do more videos where she orders her spread from a restaurant, since her on-camera reviews have turned into something of a guide to the local seafood scene in Southern California. She’s also helping her live-in boyfriend, Carlos, launch his own mukbang channel, and plotting her own line of clothing.
“For as long as this makes me happy, this is what I’m going to do,” she says.
Once you’ve tried it, a life that doesn’t involve eating lobster for money—now that would be tough to swallow.
–Additional reporting by Jeremy Glass.
