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A toxic relationship
The social media landscape today would not be what it is without the one constant love of many people’s lives: food. You can either eat to live or live to eat, but social media lives to feed off food videos, and there’s no way around that.
Social media’s current climate of overconsumption extends past the realm of food to almost every facet of consumerism. Skincare, makeup, shoes, bags, clothes…the list is just as endless as the shopping receipts. Unlike this never-ending list, today we’ll just be looking at food; specifically the overconsumption of food on social media that is promoted by certain types of influencers and content. We’ll also touch on possible solutions to this problem, or if there even are any.
The rampant consumption of food on almost every social media platform is so deeply ingrained into the fabric of our algorithms you may not even be aware that you are watching videos featuring food waste and overconsumption of food. While the truly excessive and exaggerated examples like a youtuber swimming in a pool of jelly would be fairly obvious to identify, it is often the case that more subtle ones go unnoticed and escape major backlash. Videos of people making grotesque food or using improper cooking techniques are especially popular forms of ragebait. (A term which refers to the manipulative tactic of eliciting outrage with the goal of increasing internet traffic, online engagement and revenue.)
One example is the account @katewilltryanything, where the influencer Kate posts hundreds of videos of her providing “easy recipes” that often involve large quantities of ingredients and seasonings poured into one aluminium foil baking pan.
For example, in the video attached above, Kate demonstrates a steak recipe that starts off with her putting 4 pieces of steak and meat into a trash bag. She adds entire bottles of various sauces such as mustard and barbecue sauce, a bag of sugar, an entire can of baked beans and so on. After a few shots of her sloshing around the foul mixture in the trash bag, she dumps the entire contents of it into a baking pan and bakes it.
The end product of Kate's cooking endeavours are often vile and off putting, akin to a swampy stew not even Shrek would find appetising. With this in mind it’s obvious that Kate is not actually making these recipes with the intent of eating them, and it would be hard to believe she actually does. The sad truth is she most likely throws all the food in the bin once she’s done filming, as do the countless other accounts that make similar ragebait content.
Even though Kate posts recipes that suggest her cooking skills are enough to get her on Worst Cooks In America, she boasts 192k subscribers on Youtube and 259k on Instagram for these videos. Her comment sections are full of people condemning her, insulting her food and calling her disgusting- but that’s exactly what she wants. Good engagement, bad engagement, it’s all engagement nonetheless, and Kate surely makes back the cost of her videos tenfold from all the so-called haters interacting with her videos.
The unfortunate nature of the social media algorithm is that videos that are more likely to get you to interact with them are pushed to your feed. This means that videos and accounts like Kate’s are promoted instead of discouraged. After all, what better way to get people to stay on your app than to get them so annoyed that they HAVE to comment and share?
Ragebait isn’t the only way food waste presents itself online. Another popular niche are mukbang-ers. I’m sure you’ve seen or at least heard of them before. A long-standing staple of internet content originating from Korea in the mid 2000s as online broadcasts, ‘mukbang' is a genre defined as a type of foodcasting where a host records or streams their eating for audience consumption and participation online.
These videos started off as fairly innocuous. Early mukbang broadcasts will show you realistic portions and simple, average food. In fact, this relatability is what made the genre so popular amongst Korean viewers. It felt like having lunch with a friend when you were, say, eating alone in your office canteen. (I’m often inclined to watch a mukbang while eating dinner at home by myself too.)
However, in typical internet fashion, it gained popularity and quickly lost the authenticity of its humble origins, contorting into more of an eating competition than anything else. Take a look at some of the thumbnails of mukbang youtube videos below. What do you see? I’ll tell you: thousands of calories, huge portions no human should eat in one sitting, and rows and rows of insanely unhealthy processed junk.
The mukbang scene has lost sight of what it was meant to be: a way for people to battle loneliness. Instead, it has become a horror of excessive gluttony for capitalistic gain. Mukbangers like Nikocado Avocado and Eat with Boki have dominated this category and popularised obscene displays of unhealthy foods in mukbangs.
Even though these mukbangers may be consuming the food featured in their videos, isn’t it still considered an unnecessary and wasteful act to consume twenty odd burgers in one sitting? Besides being incredibly dangerous to the influencer’s health to film such videos regularly, it can easily instil in viewers the warped reality that this is how people eat, that it’s okay to eat like this.
Furthermore, in some cases, it can be an example of incredibly harmful food waste. In the past decade, handfuls of mukbangers known for eating large portions and still maintaining a slim figure have been exposed for purging or spitting out the contents of what they eat on camera. This, while significantly less unhealthy for them, is still an incredible waste of food.
Overconsumption or over consumption?
While I’m no expert on analysing the internet and its trends, I think it’s safe to say that videos surrounding food aren’t going anywhere. Food is such an essential part of all of our lives, and watching people eat good-looking food will never fail to attract an audience of enamoured viewers. In the same way, watching people make gross food will never fail to incite a riot.
The most we can do is to stay cognisant of when we are consuming content showcasing, promoting or trying to comedify the overconsumption and wastage of food. As the cost of living increases for people all around the world, now is more the time than ever to be vigilant about entertaining such entitled and careless behaviours.
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