This so-called gastronomic voyeurism seems like a scene from a dystopian film or the next season of Black Mirror, a voluntary Orwellian exercise where people crowdsource their income as they act as a food avatar for a public so alienated they are more apt to pay a stranger to continue slurping noodles on a screen for companionship instead of seeking out free, real life dining partners.

I am the first to say that this shit looks strange! And the people watching it who are on a diet, who use it as a visual replacement for actually eating, are both veering into a disordered relationship with food and basically the real-life equivalent of those College Humor Very Mary Kate sketches from a few years ago where Mary Kate Olsen pushes a diet where you only look at food instead of eating it.

Yet I don't want to dismiss this as merely another indicator of a high-tech culture's increasing isolation and reliance on the internet. Many of the reality television programs we watch in the U.S., often while eating alone, also hook us with a voyeuristic approximation of intimacy: The Bachelor is a manufactured simulation of dating, Keeping Up With the Kardashians is a strangely compelling show about family.

While the total lack of narrative and focus on the act of eating in meok bang appears bizarre, it's a more straight-forward replacement for face-to-face companionship than many of the programs people turn on in America to forget that they're eating alone. [BBC/ Time]

Screenshot via YouTube