We analyze Korean livestream and North American pre-recorded mukbang (online eating shows), to see what and how linguistic, interactional, and multimodal resources are used by hosts to evaluate food, and thereby construct their identities as food reviewers. Audience participation also contributes to creating the eaters' identities as food reviewers.
People review food in various contexts, including everyday mealtimes (Wiggins 2002, 2013), mass media (Mapes 2018), and websites (Vásquez and Chik 2015). Food reviews also contribute to socialization (Ochs, Pontecorvo, and Fasulo 1996), cultural and ethnic marginalization (Karrebæk 2012), and understanding of healthy food practices (Gordon 2015). Building upon such work, we consider mukbang, online eating shows where hosts either livestream themselves eating on YouTube or pre-record and post afterwards (see Choe 2019; Rüdiger 2020, 2021). We demonstrate what and how linguistic, interactional, and multimodal resources are used by hosts (and at times by their audience) to evaluate food, and thereby construct their identities as food reviewers.
Drawing upon research on food assessments and food and cultural expectations (e.g., Gordon and Choe 2019), we compare 1) Korean livestream mukbang, which involve live text-based chat rooms through which viewers engage with eaters and 2) North American mukbang, where eaters pre-record and upload their eating performances to YouTube, and audience participation is thus relegated to the comments section. We illustrate that mukbang hosts depict and assess the sense of taste by using a variety of lexical and multimodal strategies. These include comparatives, 'extreme case formulations' (Pomerantz 1986); overt exclamations; 'gustatory expressions' of pleasure and disgust (Wiggins 2002, 2013) such as 'mmm', 'ew', and 'eugh'; and gestures and bodily actions to dramatize (dis)alignments toward food. We also highlight how (a)synchronous audience participation in the respective mukbang settings contributes to the eaters' identities as food reviewers, as the (a)synchronicity creates different trajectories of responding to the hosts' eating performance. Furthering what we know about technology-mediated discourse about food, our analysis therefore contributes to scholarly understandings of mukbang as a genre of food review, the ways in which foods are consumed and evaluated online, and how the audience participates in the co-construction of taste.
