This article was originally published on Rest of World in July 2024. Below is a longer version.
Creators from tribes in north-east India hope these YouTube videos will help break down harmful stereotypes that have kept them isolated from the rest of the country.
In the video that made him famous, Apollos Kent is barefoot, shirtless, and scooping out fistfuls of snails from a muddy paddy field in the countryside. The catch is then cooked with, among other things, the fiery raja mircha, one of the hottest chillies in the world. Then, out in the open, Kent begins to eat. He takes noisy slurps. He licks his fingers with relish. He grunts in appreciation. “Catch snail cook with maize and eat in naga style” uploaded on YouTube during the pandemic-induced lockdown, has 4 million views. That’s nearly twice the population of Nagaland, the remote and historically restive state in India’s north-east where Kent lives with his wife Asinle and three young sons.
If you ask Kent — a stocky 34-year-old with closely cropped hair — what he does, he will tell you he is a farmer. But he is also Nagaland’s most well-known YouTuber, a feat he achieved by making mukbang videos, inspired by the Korean digital trend of eating enormous amounts of food live on camera.
Since 2010, mukbang has travelled far beyond South Korea. Fans are largely unperturbed by possible long-term effects (critics have described it as fetishistic and encouraging unhealthy eating habits — it is banned in China), focusing instead on the thrill of watching someone devour bizarre quantities of food or the pleasing ASMR sensations. For the solo — and invariably lonely — diner, mukbang offers company, albeit through a screen.
But in India’s north-east — eight states that are home to a patchwork of tribes and ethnicities, culturally distinct from the rest of India and even each other— YouTubers like Kent using mukbang as a means to assert indigenous identities and push back against culinary stereotypes that have isolated them from the rest of the country.
“Eating large quantities of food — that’s not my thing,” says Kent, on an overcast May afternoon when Rest Of World meets him in his village, Sendenyu, a 50 km winding ride from the state capital Kohima. “Our [Naga] culture is diverse: we eat grasshoppers, we eat frogs, we eat snails. And I want to show the world that.”
The 10 mukbangers across the region Rest Of World spoke to echoed Kent. While monetization is an obvious draw, most agreed that their main motivation was to “showcase their culture”. Mukbang is a “medium for creators from the region to break stereotypes like ‘people from the region only eat insects,’” Otojit Kshetrimayum, a Manipuri sociologist and fellow at the Centre for North-East India at VV Giri National Labour Institute, told Rest of World. “These changes have come with easy access to the internet and inexpensive smartphones.”
Since the snails, Kent has cooked (and eaten) his way to thousands (715k on the last count) of subscribers and millions of views (171 million cumulative). Shot by the ever-smiling Asinle, who tails her husband with the humble arsenal of just one Chinese Android phone (Rs 10,000), ‘Kent’s Vlog’ is now a repository of real, raw, and unfiltered culinary content. If in one, he is gorging on a plate of smoked pork with axone (fermented soyabean), in the other, he is chomping away on a chicken leg and crab-egg chutney. The aesthetic is decidedly rustic and the videography, a tad amateur. But the confidence is assured: “I am no less than a master chef,” Kent says, of his cooking skills.
Hundreds of comments pour in within minutes of an upload. Some from across the country (“No one can show Naga culture to the rest of India better than you”) and others, closer home (“To be honest, I don’t feel shy to be said a Naga after watching a talented guy like you”).
The comments stand out. This is because food has often been the stick used to discriminate against people from the north-east. Isolated through decades of insurgency, there is a sense of being othered even today for their distinct physical features and dietary habits. Tribal communities from the north-east have often been denigrated as “savage”, and their fermented food traditions that include a diversity of animal protein not common in the rest of India, are derided as “stinky” by people from outside the region.
In 2007, the Delhi Police printed a handbook that asked them to refrain from “cooking axone and other fermented foods” that were “smelly.” Last year, two men from Nagaland were assaulted for selling “north-eastern” food in Ahmedabad. Landlords in the bigger Indian cities often do not rent out homes to people from the region because of the “stinky” food they cook.
U.S.-based Naga anthropologist and professor in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz Dolly Kikon traces these incidents to “inbuilt casteism in Indian society” that links food with “purity and pollution”. “Even today, landlords ask prospective tenants what they eat, and if they eat and cook something smelly. That is a deep form of discrimination,” she says.
Kent remembers his own experience from a decade ago in Kolkata, when a bunch of kids pointed at him, laughed, and shouted “ching chong” — a mocking reference to his East Asian features. “People look down on us a lot. My channel is just my way of telling the world that I’m proud to be a Naga,” Kent says.
In Rumensiyu, just 6 km away from Sendenyu, farmers Shawalo Seb and his wife, Alem Seb’s mukbangs featuring honkerü marü — a Rengma Naga chutney made with fermented dry mustard leaves, tomatoes, chillies and Naga lasoon (wild garlic) — have takers across Nagaland. “It’s become our signature dish,” Shawalo says, adding that he ate 30 boiled eggs for his debut mukbang. “But then we realised we had more special things to show.”
Indeed, the cuisines of many communities in north-east India are at odds with what an outsider would associate typical “curry- and oil-rich” Indian fare with. Diet from the region is rice-based, with meats and fish usually boiled, steamed, or smoked, with an abundance of local greens and fermented condiments.
The online landscape of north-eastern mukbang channels is filled with videos proving just that: from the young and stylish Lakyntiew Myra in Shillong (Meghalaya) and her phan saw with tungtap (a Khasi snack of boiled potatoes and fermented fish paste) to the elderly and soft-spoken Soneinuo Metha, 54, who nibbles on fried hornets and silkworms in Kohima’s Mao market. Says Bitul Chakma, who makes mukbangs of wild fruits and vegetables in Arunachal Pradesh’s Chowkham: “People know a lot about chicken and mutton. But I want to show that we eat a lot of greens too.”
When Snigdha, a YouTube creator from Meghalaya who goes only by her first name, was working in Bengaluru, she would often be asked if people from her home state ate cockroaches. Now, she creates YouTube videos of recipes with a range of north-east Indian cuisines.
“There are a lot of inhibitions about our culinary habits,” she told Rest of World. “Maybe sometimes we should not get offended and just educate people.”
Many mukbangers in the north-east spend the first part of their videos cooking or foraging ingredients like eggs from a red ant nest, mud crab, or cicadas. This exhibits the intimate relationship between tribal communities, their land, and natural resources, according to University of California’s Kikon.
“In these videos, food from the source to the table is being emphasized. There is [an] assertion of indigeneity, there is an element of ecology. In a few minutes, they [the creators] are bringing the entire landscape in, and telling their own story,” Kikon says.
According to data from Google Trends, north-eastern cities like Dimapur, Kohima, Imphal, and Aizawl are home to more mukbang searches than anywhere else in India. Statistics show that this trend peaked during the pandemic. Data analysed by Qoruz, an influencer data analytics firm , says that YouTube began to see an uptick in mukbang posts in India following the COVID-19 lockdown.
Guwahati-based vegan mukbanger Diksha Patgiri discovered mukbang when the lockdown was announced: she was stuck in another town away from her family. “The days were sluggish, I barely felt hungry. But when I discovered these videos, I got my appetite back,” she says. Soon, for Patgiri, mukbang became a ritual – her food on the plate,and her dining companion on the screen. Later, she began vegan-themed mukbangs— with “elements of the north-east”, whether it is the locally-grown lemon variety kaji nemu or the raja mircha.
While apps like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok (before it was banned) have become channels for creative pursuits, they are also means to a livelihood — especially for many educated but unemployed Indians. Kent, for example, did not disclose how much he earned, but said it was enough for him to now buy a refrigerator, a bike, and a car — what he considered luxuries before his channel took off. In Rumensiyu, Sebs earns ₹10,000- 12,000 every month, which comes in handy to buy his children diapers and clothes.
Kyong Yoon of the University of British Columbia, Canada, who has researched mukbang, says its global popularity may be traced to its “ubiquity through digital media”. “Various digital platforms such as YouTube, TikTok…provided influencers outlets through which they can monetize their mundane eating practices at low entry costs,” he says.
Though, in India, there are still hurdles: slow internet speed, long power cuts, and the occasional troll. Before a mobile phone tower was erected in his remote village in the hilly border state of Arunachal Pradesh five years ago, Chakma would hike nearly 7 kilometers (1 mile = 1.6 kilometers) to another village with a better internet network to upload his videos. Kent continues to battle connectivity problems. He’s figured out the best spot to upload his videos: He puts his phone on a flower pot outside his kitchen. Seb often treks 5 kilometers to another village to charge his devices during power outages.
Like every creator, these mukbang YouTubers deal with trolls and bullies. Kent recalls how on a mukbang of him eating frogs, someone commented that he would only stop short of “eating human flesh”. He deleted the comment immediately but “felt bad” afterward. “But it is what it is. This is what I eat and this is how I live,” he says. In the months that followed, he uploaded a diversity of mukbangs. On the menu? Crispy grasshoppers, spicy silkworms, and fried spiders.