Humor
Trying To Explain Mukbang To My Mom
Why? Why do I do things like this?
My mom is in her 90s. There’s not a lot to talk about with an elderly woman who never leaves the house and only gets a few channels over a broken TV antenna (no, she won’t let me fix it, “It works fine.”).
But I see her several times a day and I talk to her on the phone more than that. You can only talk about the weather so much. Eventually, I venture out into more interesting topics, like murder — we love murder, who doesn’t love murder?— and occasionally something like, oh, mukbang.
Here’s the thing about the internet. It not only gives us access to things that exist, it creates things that couldn’t have existed without the internet. The internet is parthenogenic — it makes something out of nothing.
Like mukbang, for example.
Now, I know it’s a bad idea before I even open my mouth. How am I going to explain videos of Asian kids eating vast quantities of food on the internet to my mom?
“Why?”
“Well, mom, I don’t really know.”
But of course, I do know, because I love mukbang.
My sound machine could just be a loop of people chewing. That’s how relaxing it is to me.
