TheFoodSurgeon/YouTubeThe Food Surgeon's video, "Reese's Peanut-Butter-Ectomy with Oreo Cream Transplant," has over a million views.
These may be frenzied times, but more than a million people have made space in their schedules to watch someone on YouTube performing surgery on food.
One film, Reese’s Peanut-Butter-Ectomy with Oreo Cream Transplant, presents a pair of latex-gloved hands using a scalpel to slowly unsheathe said peanut-butter sweet from its crinkly packaging, slice around and prise off its circular lid, and then replace the filling with cream, gently scraped from an Oreo cookie. After the lid has been put back, we hear the mysterious surgeon eat some, before replacing what’s left of his handiwork back on the table. File it under “weirdly satisfying”.
The film was posted three weeks ago, and was the second in a weekly series by someone calling himself the Food Surgeon. The surgeon (who wishes to remain anonymous) tells me his next instalment will appear today and features “something everyone loves: chocolate”. However, fetishising sweeties is not his primary motivation. Dissection of a Garlic Bulb, for instance, is as compelling as the Oreo film. The rustling and cutting of the bulb’s crispy skin is surprisingly pleasing, as is the parting of the cloves, and the way he cuts slithers of garlic with barely any resistance. The other three films, so far, are Avocado In-Vitro Fertilisation, Dissecting a Cutie (Californian Mandarin Orange) and Strawberry-Seed Extraction and Nutella Augmentation.
Whether it’s the crackle of packaging, the unzipping of a pouch containing assorted blades, or the incidental taps and swishes of gentle activity, sound is key to the effect. “I want the audio experience to be as compelling as the visual experience,” says the surgeon. “Many of my scenes are motivated by audio, such as pulling the garlic bulb out of the grocery bag or peeling the wrapper off the Reese’s cup.” He instinctively knows that this will keep us keen – and science backs him up. A 2004 psychology study found that the louder and crisper the sounds we hear, the fresher we think food tastes. Naturally, the food industry is privy to this, and ripping open crinkly packaging has become part of the sensory thrill of confectionary and savoury snacks.
This all begs the question: why? Is it food porn? A scalpel fixation? “I would say that my films are part art (it’s creative expression, after all), part food porn, with a dash of ASMR,” he says. ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response – a tingly, relaxed reaction, sometimes called a head orgasm, which can brought on in some people by hearing or watching mundane activities such as hair-brushing, beard-rubbing, someone gently tapping while working, or whispering. There’s a whole YouTube subculture of films made to elicit this sensation. Only one scientific paper has been published on ASMR, by psychologists at Swansea University last year, in which they established that people most often use these films for relaxation, usually tuning in just before bedtime.
If you’re wondering what the hell these people are on about, you’re probably one of the people who doesn’t get ASMR. However, ASMR isn’t the Food Surgeon’s sole aim. “Although I have the ASMR community in mind,” he says, “nothing I do is specifically for them. If I were to cater to that community, my videos would be 10 times longer and use way fewer jump-cuts.”
He certainly loves cutting (mostly with precision instruments), and is as influenced by the YouTube cookery channels Food Wishes and the Silent Chef as by the ASMR tribe. Both of those channels focus on the food, rather than the chef’s personality, and their instructional videos are processions of satisfying noises from, say, foil spread across a grill pan or eggs being cracked, alongside dreamy closeups of someone slicing a perfectly ripe peach, or a raw steak.
The Food Surgeon takes these inspirations to the next level by doing them for their own sake, with no recipe attached. “For me, the focus is on the sound and the camera angles, while the food is just the creative medium.” He does want the food to seem appetising, though, but only partly to attract viewers. “I end up eating all my patients, so creating things that look and taste delicious has its benefits,” he says.
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
This article was written by Amy Fleming from The Guardian and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
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