In Asia, villagers from developing countries have found a surprising way to fight poverty: cooking and eating large quantities of rural food in front of a camera for their Youtube fans. In those remote villages where it is easier to buy a Chinese smartphone than a bottle of Coca-Cola and where 4G is more common than clean water, YouTube and TikTok are becoming the new eldorado.
To understand the success stories of those “village cooking” YouTube channels which rock the Internet, we spent some time in one of the them in Cambodia. There, spicy rats, deep fried geckos or one hundreds grilled chicken marinated with coconut sauce are one of the several secret recipes to make money online. And it works! The villagers we followed and who run “Kitchen food” channel earn 30 000 euros per month…far from the 250 euros average income of the country. How the villagers manage to feed their inhabitants by using the Internet? Why viewers like watching them eating weird food online? What this behaviour tells about today societies? Through interviews and photographs, this photo essay documents the way Internet can feed the poors…
