In ‘mukbang’ videos by North East YouTubers, a menu to challenge stereotypes

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

In the video that made him famous, Apollos Kent is barefoot, shirtless, and scooping fistfuls of snails out from a muddy paddy field.

He cooks the snails on a campfire with indigenous ingredients including ghost peppers and mustard greens. Then, he eats the dish with noisy slurps, licking his fingers with relish, and grunting in appreciation. The video has nearly 4 million views on YouTube.

Kent, a 34-year-old farmer, is among the best-known YouTubers from the North East Indian state of Nagaland making mukbang videos. The videos, which originated in South Korea, feature a person eating vast amounts of food on camera. Mukbang has been criticised for promoting unhealthy eating and food waste. But Kent says he makes these videos to showcase a unique food culture, often stereotyped as “smelly” and “stinky”.

“Eating large quantities of food – that’s not my thing,” Kent told Rest of World. “Our [Naga] culture is diverse: We eat grasshoppers, we eat frogs, we eat snails. And I want to show the world that.”

India’s northeast includes eight states, and is home to various tribes and ethnicities — each culturally distinct from each other and the rest of the country. For local YouTubers like Kent, mukbang videos allow them to...

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