ABSTRACT
Food can be a powerful affective material, assembling with humans to generate forceful vitalities and intensities. This chapter examines the ways in which the phenomenon of excessive food consumption and preparation is portrayed on YouTube. It focuses on two case studies: ‘cheat day’ videos posted to the channel of Asian-American fitness and health influencer Stephanie Buttermore, and cooking videos on the Epic Meal Time channel made by a group of white Canadian men based in Montreal. Excessive food consumption has long been a carnivalesque tradition, a way of celebrating feast days and holidays and marking them as extraordinary. In digital media, humans and non-humans come together to generate affects in response to food-related topics and issues such as food production and processing, eating and cooking practices, human embodiment, gender relations, racial or ethnic politics, religious belief, climate change and animal rights. Epic Meal Time is one of the most well-known and popular of the genre of excessive food on YouTube.
