Usually within about 30 seconds of opening the TikTok app on my phone, I can almost guarantee that I will see a video of someone eating. Maybe they’re sitting in their car with a sack full of fast food, or perhaps they’ve just prepared an elaborate meal that they’re sloppily plating into bowls, but within seconds, the eating begins. In 2025, it feels like the entire internet is mukbang, and I’m not the only one who can’t stop watching.
For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, mukbang, which roughly translates to “eating show,” was first popularized in South Korea in the 2010s. In these eating shows — which usually involve an individual or group sitting down to eat a meal that’s already been prepared, camera pointed directly at them — both celebrities and regular folks began attracting massive audiences, who would just hang out and watch their favorite mukbangers eat a giant bowl of noodles or kimchi jjigae on a Twitch livestream. Abundance was always part of the point, creating a visual you just couldn’t look away from. But so was sound: Mukbangers largely ate without talking, and many viewers watched mukbang videos hoping to provoke an autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), or a pleasant tingly feeling that many people say is the result of listening to the calming, repetitive sounds of someone eating, or tapping their nails, or gently whispering.
The trend made its way to the United States shortly thereafter. By 2017, YouTubers like Trisha Paytas started creating their own mukbang videos, telling the camera about their day while eating pizza, chicken nuggets, and Taco Bell. These early American videos already differed from their South Korean counterparts. They usually weren’t livestreamed, just posted to YouTube or a Facebook account, and even though they clearly required a lot of prep in ordering the food and setting up a camera, American mukbang videos generally boasted a more impromptu, less structured vibe. “We’ve Americanized it to where I’m talking about how I’m feeling that day or telling a story from my past,” U.S.-based mukbanger Ashley Sprankles told Eater in 2017.
Early mukbang videos proved that there’s a strong human desire to watch (mostly) normal people do (mostly) normal stuff.
Nearly a decade later, though, the meaning of mukbang seems to have shifted dramatically. No longer does a creator have to consume enormous amounts of food to qualify as a mukbanger; now, it really just means “eating in front of a camera.” In this new iteration of American mukbang, ideally the food is messy — dripping with tons of sauce or so juicy that it must be eaten with latex gloves — and visually compelling, like seafood boils tinged bright red with tons of chile oil, or a hot dog dripping with chili and cheese. There’s less polish to this generation of mukbangs, too: Instead of a table set with utensils and a homemade meal, it’s just someone shoving delivery pizza into their face after dipping it into a giant cup of ranch dressing, remnants of sauce still lingering in the corners of their mouth. Maybe they’re even sitting inside their car, a popular filming site for mukbang videos.
In the ensuing years since mukbang made its way to the States, the way we consume video has changed dramatically. TikTok parent company ByteDance launched a progenitor in China in 2016; after a merge with Musical.ly the following year, it officially launched in the U.S. as TikTok, emphasizing short videos, under a minute long, in August 2018. By February 2019, the app hit 1 billion downloads. Today, TikTok has more than 1 billion active users per month, and now, you don’t have to commit to watching an entire 20-minute (or hour-long!) eating show on YouTube. Instead, you’re more likely to half-watch a three-minute mukbang video on TikTok (or its competitor, Instagram Reels, which launched in 2020) while you’re waiting for the subway or doomscrolling on the couch. The shorter format has made it easier to buy into this type of content, whether you’re the creator making it or the viewer watching it.
As current TikTok feeds show, early mukbang videos proved that there’s a strong human desire to watch (mostly) normal people do (mostly) normal stuff. We now go to Instagram to watch people put on their makeup in wildly popular “Get Ready With Me” videos, and gawk while creators do chores and go to the grocery store in “Day in the Life” TikToks. We watch people restock the groceries in their refrigerators and deep-clean their bathrooms. This is a distinctly mundane type of voyeurism, but one that I often find myself unable to stop engaging in, for reasons I can’t quite explain.
The widespread popularity of mukbang is just further proof that basically everything we do for fun — or for sustenance — can be turned into content. Social media virality has a way of flattening things, of drilling down concepts like mukbang into their basest, most easily replicable form. You don’t need to cook a bunch of food, you just need to swing through a drive-thru. You don’t even really have to plan ahead, either — you can just throw open the TikTok app and start eating.
When I first reported on the rising popularity of mukbang in 2017, it felt very clear that these videos are, on some level, a way for many people to combat the loneliness that they feel in an increasingly isolated society. Many people eat their meals alone at home, and watching someone else eat and chat while warming up your boring frozen TV dinner creates the illusion of dining with someone else.
We’re arguably even more isolated now than in 2017. The enshittification of social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook means that we’re not even seeing content from our friends and family anymore, just a constant onslaught of AI slop and advertising. That makes mukbang videos, with human faces and voices front and center, even more compelling. Many of these videos lean into creating a friendly, intimate connection between creator and viewer, styled to feel a bit like FaceTime calls. “Hey besties, let’s eat,” one creator cheerily yells as she prepares to dig into a plate of steak and scallops.
And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to watch someone eat, I do think that there’s a more sinister element to the proliferation of mukbang, one that’s intimately connected to our ongoing cultural obsession with the pursuit of thinness. In an era when millions of Americans are taking weight-loss drugs that severely limit their ability to eat at all, there seems to be something uniquely appealing about watching someone else eat all the carbs and fried food that you’re denying yourself, whether that’s a massive spread of fast food or just an order of fries. “Either I feel satisfied by watching them eat, or I end up disgusted by the amount of food,” wrote one user on a forum for people with eating disorders. “Either way I don’t feel hungry afterwards.”
If it is true that we’re all watching mukbangs because we’re lonely and terrified to eat “fattening foods,” that’s just the clearest reflection of the society that we’re living in that I’ve ever seen. Everyone is craving comfort and connection and a nonstop dopamine drip, and platforms like TikTok are all too happy to provide them. It’s just that, like watching someone eat, a simulacrum of emotional connection doesn’t actually fill you up.
