Fragment of a note to a friend, late 2022, after we’d been speaking about the future of breakfast cereal—this was for a proposed project for one of the major cereal vendors. I had been describing the amateur YouTuber “SassESnacks”, whose carefully-mic’d recordings of herself eating chocolate cake, spicy salmon role, mochi, pizza, noodles, and a variety of “healthy snacks” have millions of views. Years after her death, in 2019, of pancreatic cancer, viewers continued to address SassE in the comments, telling her how much they missed her, how much her videos had helped them.
In this case I suspect watching and listening to someone eat has become a proxy for sharing food with them—perhaps being fed by them. In some of her posts a lot of the action consists in her preparing the meal first—this enhances my sense that what at least some devotees are getting from meokbang [Korean: “eating show”] is an experience of being cared for, of being securely held. Most of those who find their way into this scene, I suspect, have a pronounced ASMR [autonomous sensory meridian response]—they experience an evoked rheotactic sensation up the cervical spine and caudorostrally over the occiput in response to quiet reciprocating impulsive sounds (crackling, crunching, mixers, washers, muffled heartbeats). Whether you think this is a vestigial reward for crunching through charred long bones to get at the marrow or simply an epiphenomenon of neural crest ontogenesis and the evolutionary history of rheotactic mechanosensing inherited from teleosts, the effect is to feel as if someone were stroking you up the back of the neck while you watch them prepare something (for you?) to eat. That meets a deep need, especially if you’ve just come home at the end of a long day of building slide decks in a cubicle CAFO …
Of course the obverse of ASMR is misophonia. Do you really want to live in a world where you’re constantly surrounded by the sounds of people crunching cereal? Does cereal become a food of intimacy, a test of trust? The first time you eat cereal in front of someone without worrying about how they’re going to respond to the sound of your crunching—that’s a test.
In a sensory ecology of ubiquitous anosmia and declining taste buds, mouthfeel moves to the center of the pleasure of eating. The future is crunchy.
I wish I could say I’d punched up the diction to satirical effect. Alas, this is how I talk when no one is listening.
From work in progress, a follow-up to Waking Paralysis. The narrator is quoting from their own stalled work in progress.
… regarded his bowl, neglected, still half full of what now struck him as a congealed mass of cooling meal-components, unappealing. When he was underslept he lost his taste for umami and acid—or was this something he had read? It was both: he had read that when you were underslept you had a lower intensity threshold for umami and acid, and then he found that this accorded with his own experience. He could eat later. He must move or he’d crash sitting there in front of her, nod off mid-sentence and come to to find her watching him with concern.
Again, lots of color, but nothing that promised to congeal into a story. I had got in the habit of listening to old meokbang to help me get to sleep. I got one of those devices like a gua sha scraper that you draw across the wrists and brow when you lie down to hear women who died before you were born extract mugwort mochi from heat-sealed mylar wrappers and make coffee from those single-serve tear-off packets with the glossy lining, describe their mic setup, wrap ice cream in fruit leather and tap the sugar gyoza, as the outcome of this procedure was known, with lacquered nails. There were scrapers that would allow you to see the video projected on your inner screen, but I was living beyond my means as was and in any case I did not care for video. I was in it for the sounds of chewing, of foods I would never eat, never desire to eat: carrot cake, spicy salmon roll, straining to catch the squeak of a supermarket PET clamshell as they unpacked their haul. The spill of peanuts in a melamine bowl at the start of a healthy snacks episode ran down my spine like a shaman’s rattle. This was true sorcery, and it got me through a difficult year.
Sugar gyoza was my own innovation, but the thing about wrapping ice cream in fruit leather was in the news that week.
The idea that ASMR could represent a vestige of “rheotactic mechanosensing”, that is, the lateral line system (not “inherited from” teleosts, as I wrote in the otherwise awkwardly precise note quoted above, but perhaps present in the common ancestor of teleosts and synapsids such as ourselves), however speculative, appeals to me because it evokes a narrative arc joining modalities of hair cell–based mechanosensing across evolutionary history: from the gravity-sensing statocysts present in ctenophores and cnidarians to the flow- sensing neuromasts of the teleost and amphibian lateral line systems to the vestibular sense of angular acceleration and, of course, cochlear hearing.
Natural history here is nothing more than a prop—a way of drawing attention to the fact that sound is a form of sensed movement (or perhaps: of forming an interpretation of sound as sensed movement).