Most of us can probably agree that eating food is more enjoyable than watching someone else eat food. For one, it’s a basic human need. It also tastes good a lot of the time. Not to mention, people can be pretty gross when they eat, especially when they do so in over-the-top, finger-licking fashion.
Still, hundreds of thousands of people tune in each week to watch Bethany Gaskin binge-eat shellfish on YouTube.
Mrs. Gaskin, 44, has capitalized on the popularity of a food-video genre known as mukbang, which involves scarfing down, on camera, more grub than should rightly be consumed in a single sitting.
On her two YouTube channels, Bloveslife and BlovesASMR Eating Her Way, Mrs. Gaskin chats up her audience while eating king crab legs, mussels, lobster tails, hard-boiled eggs and roasted red potatoes. The videos, produced in her Cincinnati home, have made her a millionaire, she said. But getting into the business wasn’t about money; mukbang was more of a calling than a vocation.“I think of mukbanging as a ministry,” Mrs. Gaskin said. “I didn’t consult with my husband before I quit my job. I knew this was it, and I quit by faith.”
The Spread of Binge Culture
Mukbang seems to have begun as an internet trend more than a decade ago in South Korea. The name is a mash-up of the Korean words for let’s eat (“muk-ja”) and broadcasting (“bang-song”). Korean live-streamers often schedule their mukbang videos to align with dinnertime hours, so their viewers eating alone at home feel like they’re sharing a meal with a friend.
Viewers cite other benefits too. Watching the videos can serve as an appetite-curbing exercise. And for a certain subset, the sounds of a person eating foster an autonomous sensory meridian response, or A.S.M.R.; viewers derive pleasure from the sounds created by extra-loud crunching, slurping and lip smacking. (...)
Gross Profits
Perhaps the noisy and bad-mannered eating is off-putting for most, but the genre has a lot of devotees, if Mrs. Gaskin’s success is any indication. Her primary YouTube channel, Bloveslife, has 1.8million subscribers, and on Instagram she has a following of nearly 900,000, one of whom is Cardi B.
Through advertising on her videos, Mrs. Gaskin said she has made more than $1 million, providing screenshots of a report from YouTube.
Before becoming a YouTube sensation, Mrs. Gaskin, who has an associate’s degree in early childhood development, owned a day care facility. After five years, she sold the business and used the money to pay off loans and leases. She then got a job making circuit boards for the military for a year.
In 2017, she started making Food Network-style cooking videos in her home kitchen and posting them on YouTube. “I’m a foodie,” Mrs. Gaskin said. “I’ve always liked to cook.”
“Then I did a mukbang, and people just went crazy,” she said. “I was like, ‘People want to see me eat, this is weird,’ and since they were easier to record, I just started doing mukbangs and all of a sudden, it just took off from there.”
by Jasmin Barmore, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
[ed. What a world.]
