The Internet Has Forgotten How to Eat

I inadvertently land on these internet eating reels all the time. If I am famished, it makes me hungry. If I am stuffed, I want to skip. Instead, I get trapped in a conflicting spiral moving rapidly from total clinical disgust to a dark, morbid curiosity.

It is exactly like driving past a multi-car highway wreck. You know you should not look, but you stare anyway. You are watching a grown adult with a mortgage destroy their internal plumbing just so a teenager across the world will press a little heart icon. It makes you wonder why we ever climbed out of the swamps.

1. The Gluttonous Speed Demons

First are the professional tapeworms. These speed-eaters choke down a grotesque mountain of meat or ten kilograms of flatbread against a flashing digital countdown clock.

You never see the actual ending of the movie because the cameras always cut away before the biological reality kicks in. They hide the aftermath of a man weeping on a public bathroom floor because watching someone slowly dissolve into a grease puddle does not pull in corporate sponsors.

It is not a fast metabolism, pal. It is a miserable science. These skinny characters spend their mornings water loading with liters of tap water or eating pounds of raw cabbage to stretch their stomachs into an overstretched rubber bag. They must stay thin because a thick layer of beer-belly fat acts like a corset, physically blocking internal expansion. The second the camera turns off, they go home to live on ice cubes or perform a tactical two-finger reset behind a curtain. It is an awful sideshow turning a medical emergency into an advertising check.

2. The Audio-Sensory Mukbang Voyeurs

Next is the Mukbang crowd. Unlike the speed-demons, they are not in a rush. They sit in a brightly lit room with a microphone so sensitive you can hear their jaw hinges grinding. They zoom into their faces and proceed to chew, slurp, and smack their lips for forty-five minutes straight. If I wanted to hear wet, squelching noises, I would buy a kennel and feed a pack of bulldogs.

Half the time, the creator is an incredibly petite girl who looks like she weighs forty-five kilograms soaking wet. She sits there with a serene smile and systematically inhales six seafood platters that could feed a small infantry division. The whole thing is a virtual social illusion meant to provide companionship for lonely people eating alone in micro-apartments. To me, it just feels like a magic trick where the assistant is also the monster.

3. The Scripted Marital Meat-Theft Dramas

Then you run into the scripted couple videos. A couple sits in front of a banquet table layout massive enough to feed a medieval king. The entire premise is built on obvious meat stealing. The husband pulls a stunt to distract the wife, like deliberately dropping his fork under the table. It takes this grown man twenty odd seconds to locate a piece of cutlery on the floor.

While he is down in the abyss, the calm, innocent wife suddenly activates hyper-speed. She grabs an entire chicken, douses it in an ungodly amount of fiery chili sauce, and inhales the whole thing in under three seconds. By the time the husband resurfaces, the chicken is gone and she is chewing casually like nothing happened. It is completely artificial domestic theater performed for digital clout.

4. The “Silent Cheat Day” Fitness Hypocrites

Then come the fitness influencers. They spend six days a week posting videos of themselves eating plain boiled chicken breast out of a plastic container. They look like they have not tasted joy or salt since 2014.

Come Sunday, they drop the 10,000 Calorie Cheat Day video. The fitness hypocrite sits surrounded by four boxes of donuts and two large pizzas. They eat with a deadpan, mechanical expression, chewing through a glazed donut like a factory machine processing cardboard. It is performative gluttony marketed as balance, but it is just a highly public, monetized eating disorder designed to feed the algorithm.

5. The Aggressive Aesthetic Creators

Finally, we have the angry chefs. They decided cooking videos needed to feel like a dynamic, high-stakes military operation.

There is no talking or gentle explanation. Instead, the video is a rapid-fire assault of violent audio clips. The chef slaps raw meat onto a wooden board with the force of a thunderclap. Smack! They take a giant cleaver and aggressively crush a head of garlic into a paste. Thud! They scrape the knife against the grilled crust of a steak. Scrape! Why is the food so angry? Cooking used to be a peaceful craft, but now it looks like a psychological thriller.

The Lame Reality

If you step back and look at the wreckage, you realize the true crime here: these videos teach us absolutely nothing. They are so incredibly lame that I sit here scratching my head, wondering how we let entertainment get this empty.

There is no learning, no cultural history, and no respect for the actual craft of cooking. A rich, ancient culinary heritage is completely defaced and reduced to a cheap sound effect, a giant cheese pull, or a fake domestic stunt. It is an intellectual vacuum designed by an algorithm to keep you scrolling until your brain goes entirely numb.

We have managed to take the most fundamental, communal act of human survival, which is sitting down to eat a meal, and turned it into a freak show. We are no longer looking at food as sustenance, culture, or comfort. We are treating it like fuel for a digital circus where the currency is our collective sanity. It is stupid, it is exhausting, and frankly, I am putting my phone face down and eating a plain piece of toast in total silence.