photo by Olaf Growald
Ashley Bell, "Cuzzo AB"
Ashley Bell, "Cuzzo AB"
It’s no secret that sit-down meals with family and friends are often a daily ritual at the core of human nature. Loved ones spin tales about the events of their day around the dinner table, perhaps sharing exhilarating news from work or apprehension toward tomorrow. Vulnerability is spread out alongside hot plates of food.
That experience with a complete stranger outside your inner circle may prove uncomfortable.
“What the hell is this?” Those were the first words to enter Ashley Bell’s mind whenever she stumbled upon the first handful of YouTube videos featuring content creators sitting across from a camera, holding conversations with viewers, and loudly chowing down on food — complete with the lip-smacking, finger-licking, and crunching some vehemently hate.
Thing is, Bell sat for hours in fascination in the midst of her deep dive into “mukbang,” a word you probably don’t know, a genre of video sweeping social media, and the catalyst for Bell’s now 46,000-subscriber online alter ego, Cuzzo AB.
Boiled down, Dictionary.com tells us the mukbang trend began around 2010 in South Korea, and the word itself is a portmanteau of the Korean words for eating (meokneun) and broadcast (bangsong). With roots in Korean TV variety shows following guests around wherever they eat, mukbang was born whenever live-streaming began to pick up steam early in the decade.
Bell sat for hours watching content from Bloveslife, the “most famous” mukbang YouTuber with more than 2 million subscribers. Bell was motivated to launch Cuzzo AB on YouTube in January after she was both fascinated by the copious food and various conversations she shared with her viewership.
Bell was also coping with depression at the time, during which she experienced immense difficulty eating.
“I couldn’t eat … I had a horrible time eating,” Bell says about her depression. “So, I thought, Well, if I do mukbangs, I have to eat … Even if I eat a little bit, it’ll start progressing to eating.”
Making her first video? Scary. In fact, so scary, Bell sat in front of her humble camera setup and ate without saying a word. Ten minutes of footage were whittled down to a mere three minutes.
“I was so uncomfortable. It was the scariest thing in the world,” Bell says. But eventually she would see through her paralysis in front of the camera and focus on what attracted her to this content genre in the first place: the fact that YouTubers invest hours of labor into creating mukbang videos.
“It was the scariest thing in the world … then, I just did it,” Bell says. “I started YouTube because I was depressed, and I would listen to everybody’s conversations. And I was like, ‘Oh man, they’re so inspiring.’ I thought maybe I could inspire other people.”
Since Bell hit her stride around March, it’s been all smiles painted across Cuzzo AB’s YouTube channel. “YA FAVORITE CUZZO” flies above Bell’s dozens of videos on her page’s header image, welcoming anybody online as family.
Bell invests a lot of resources into her channel. Good seafood can be about $200, and she says a good video altogether costs around $250. Of note, perhaps contrary to popular belief, Bell doesn’t have a strong appetite, but what fuels her hunger to keep producing lies within viewer reception.
“The comments section is probably the greatest thing after you record the video,” Bell says. “It’s incredible to see so many people of diversity — blacks and whites, it doesn’t matter who you are — to just come together and be a family.”
