Over the years mukbang videos have become my ambient background viewing of choice. I watch them while I work, clean, or complete an idle task around the house. For me, watching other people enjoy a meal provides quiet comfort and a strange sense of satisfaction—especially during a couple of years of dining almost exclusively in my own home.
Mukbang is a Korean portmanteau meaning “eating broadcast.” The trend, in which strangers on the internet consume (often obscene amounts of) food while talking to a camera, started in South Korea. But it has become so popular worldwide that the word was recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Watching all of these videos meant it didn’t take long to notice a trend among South Korean mukbangers and food YouTubers: Instead of eating with stainless-steel spoons, they use wooden soup spoons for slurping scalding hot stews and scooping mounds of steaming white rice.
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At first I theorized that the wooden spoons were meant to prevent the sound of metal scraping against stainless-steel bowls and ceramic dishware. (Mukbang videos are also popular for their ASMR effects, which means many mukbangers use highly sensitive mics.) But Korean American food and lifestyle vloggerRachel Kimoffers a few other compelling explanations for why these spoons—known in Korea as sutgarak or sujeo, and which are typically sold with chopsticks, or jeotgarak, in a set—have become standard props in Korean mukbang videos.
“Wooden spoons just make food taste better,” Kim tells me in a Zoom interview from Philadelphia. “When I eat with a metal spoon, it feels cold and food can taste metallic. Wooden spoons feel more homey.”
Kim’s 40,000 YouTube subscribers tune in to see what she typically eats in a week as a med student. And when eating at home, her utensil of choice for digging into soups, stews, and rice bowls is usually a wooden spoon. She loves how they look on camera too: “Viewers often comment that wooden spoons look so calming,” she says. She also notes that wooden spoons tend to have longer handles, which also allow diners to reach deeper into their soup bowls and into any of several dishes sprawled across the table.
Soups and stews are a major part of the Korean culinary repertoire. See: guk, tang (both of which mean soup), or jjigae (stew). They’re traditionally cooked in earthenware pots, served straight to the table in all their bubbling, scalding hot glory, and consumed right away, roofs of mouths be damned. In the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) Korean bronzeware, called yugi, was reserved for the noble and elite, and wooden spoons were historically used in South Korea by the poor and working class. Today participants in online communities sometimes describe South Korea's socio-economic structure through something called “spoon class theory;” classes range from the diamond spoon (0.1% of the upper class who have $2.5 million in assets) to dirt spoons (those who make less than $17,000 a year). The metaphor is meant to demonstrate wealth inequality and how accumulated wealth is inherited.
