On YouTube, the unsuspected culinary success of a small Cambodian village

“I will need a hundred rats for tomorrow, is that possible?” », Sopheak asks a vendor at Moung Ruessei Market, who nods in her counterfeit Chanel hat as she writes down the order. “The dishes with the rats are always a hit on my YouTube channel”, launches the young Cambodian of 35 years to explain his choice. No time to waste, he must now pick up 132 kg of chicken from another saleswoman to whom he placed an order the day before. In front of the gutted poultry stand, Sopheak looks back on his journey. He is waiting for his sister Sina and his brother-in-law Mok, who participate in all the videos of Kitchen Foods, his YouTube channel.

Sopheak Lim in the office of her new home built with income earned from her Kitchen Food YouTube channel.  In Kamreng (Cambodia), January 16, 2023.
Camera in hand, Sopheak films Sina and her husband buying fresh chicken for 330 euros at the Moung Ruessei market (Cambodia), January 15, 2023.
Far from the sanitized supermarket shelves, Sina and her husband collect the chickens prepared especially for them.
Each cooked dish costs around $500 to prepare.  To do this, Sina and her husband exchange with the jeweler of the market American dollars in riels, the Cambodian currency.

“In 2018, I was employed in a mobile phone store in Phnom Penh, and I was looking for a way to make more money. I typed on Google “how to make money”, I found a training course which I followed. That’s how I started creating YouTube channels about my passions: boxing and movies., he says. But the success is not there and Sopheak’s accounts are closed by the platform because he did not respect the copyrights of the extracts of the videos he used in his productions. “I was a little disappointed but I didn’t give up, he resumes. And then I had the idea of ​​making videos about the kitchen in the village where my sister and her husband live. This is how I started Kitchen Foods. »

The success of Asian rural cuisine

He is not the only one to have had this idea. Since 2017, YouTube channels of rural cuisine from developing countries in Asia have started to emerge. From Bangladesh to India, via Cambodia, all have in common to entertain their subscribers by cooking and devouring large quantities of local specialties, before redistributing the leftovers to the poorest. And the sauce seems to take: the Bangladeshi channel Grandpa Kitchen thus totals 9.5 million subscribers and nearly a billion views, when its Indian competitor Village Cooking Channelshe is close to twenty million subscribers and has accumulated more than five billion views.

The filming of the videos is done with a camera, a tripod and a tablecloth as a sun visor.  In Kamreng (Cambodia), January 16, 2023.
Sopheak, smartphone in hand, lights up a gecko's hiding place to help his brother-in-law capture it.
Sina and her husband Mok go gecko hunting.  The little reptiles will then be pan-fried for the recording of a new video for their YouTube channel.

Certainly, with its two hundred million views and some 570,000 subscribers, Kitchen Foods is not yet at that level. But the Cambodian channel still earns Sopheak around the equivalent of “10,000 euros per month, 15,000 the good months”. A real fortune in a country where the average monthly salary is around 250 euros.

The recipe for this success, Sopheak explains it in his own way: “On YouTube, people like to watch the impossible. They are not used to seeing peasants swallowing huge quantities of food. It seems unreal to them! There is also the type of food we cook. By watching our videos, city dwellers realize that in exchange for more comfort, they have made their existence boring. »

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