I’m Obsessed With a YouTube Fast Food Vlogger

This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.

Here’s a confession: I am obsessed with watching videos of an overweight man stuffing his face with fast food.

It’s not a sexual fetish, or any kind of fetish at all, really. Perhaps it’s best classified as an interest, a hobby. But aren’t those words reserved for collecting baseball cards and watching birds and playing tennis?

I do not know this man, Joey Hernandez, not personally. I only know him through a screen, another stranger in an online world of strangers. The videos on his YouTube Channel, Joey’s World Tour, offer only fleeting glimpses into his personal life. A few of his older videos show him cooking in his home kitchen, with the limited counter space and outdated appliances that’d drive the yuppie house hunters on HGTV directly into an existential crisis. Here and there, Joey drops hints: He mentions living in central California and having attended culinary school, and a quick Google search confirms these details. Last year, I attempted to contact Joey via email and social media to learn more about him for the sake of a piece I was writing and also to satisfy my own curiosity, but my repeated requests went unanswered.

Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe getting bland answers to my blander questions — what inspired the attempt to make a career of “reviewing” fast food? What is his long-term vision for his channel? Who does he perceive his subscribers to be, and why does he think they tune in? Etc. — would dampen my fire, and I’d be forced to take up a new pastime, such as swing dance or stamp collecting. Maybe our relationship is exactly as it should be, with Joey on my Macbook screen, and me, an anonymous viewer, one of 300,000+ subscribers.

Joey didn’t always do fast food reviews. His channel initially flailed, all these detatched tentacles grasping in vain for a through line. In the early days, he posted videos of his trip to Disneyland. He posted videos of himself buying a cell phone at a shopping mall; walking labored laps around the track of a local school while discussing his struggles with weight loss; making a miniature microwaveable Japanese pancake from a kit.

He also posted the aforementioned cooking videos, and eventually, food challenges. One particularly memorable example was the Queso Challenge, in which Joey attempted to eat two jars of queso and an entire bag of Tostitos by dumping all of these food items into a glass bowl and shoving his head inside, as you do. His channel was a shaky, meandering personal video blog, and not a very interesting one at that, lacking the drama and glamour and single-mindedness of, say, vlogs produced by YouTube’s gamer and vegan communities.

But time, experience, and response steered his channel onto a clearcut path. Now you click on a newly posted video and you know what you’re in for. Each episode, usually between five and 10 minutes in length, features a review of a different fast food item, or sometimes merely a processed food item available in the supermarket (Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, for instance).

In the case of a fast food review, Joey pulls through a drive-thru window and places his order. This part isn’t always shown, but implied. We usually catch our first glimpse of Joey in the driver’s seat of his car, parked outside of the establishment, the bag of food already paid for and received. He presents the still-wrapped food item he’s going to be reviewing, states the price. He offers us a close-up shot of the unwrapped item on the passenger seat or resting on the center console, and often uses the fingers of his free hand (the one not holding the camera) to temporarily deconstruct the item: to remove the bun, lift the pickles, or prod at the chili cheese fries.

We cut then to the money shot, the reason we’re all here and the reason we’ll all return. The camera is mounted on the dash, and Joey, his hands unencumbered by electronic devices, clutches and then lunges at his food. Make no mistake, Joey’s bites are not dainty or timid, the kind of bites many of us would feel inclined to take when being filmed; rather, they are unapologetic, a literal mouthful.

How many of us have sat in fast food parking lots eating our feelings?

Food in situ, he chews as we watch, awaiting the verdict. No slick editing, no cut to a less visceral, more aesthetically pleasing moment. We are some hundreds of miles north of Hollywood, and deep within the depths of YouTube. The chewing continues for as long as it actually takes. In lieu of fancy effects, Joey pulls faces as he chews, produces sounds. “Mmm. Mhmm. Uh-huh.” As though he’s a keen and seasoned listener, responding affirmatively to an imaginary conversation.

At last, Joey swallows, wipes his mouth with a napkin, offers a few comments on the food. Although his channel is primarily devoted to fast food “reviews,” Joey is not a particularly adept reviewer. He describes the cheese on an item as being “cheesy” and the bread as tasting “like regular bread.” He slurs and trips over his own words. He’s all mixed metaphors and incomplete trains of thought. We are often left hanging.

I am the first to admit that watching these videos is not a normal way to spend one’s time, especially as a reasonably health-conscious person who rarely eats fast food. I have no interest in trying most of the foods for myself (and in fact that majority of them aren’t even available in the UK, where I currently live), and yet, here I remain, ogling.

Why am I unable to pull myself away? It’s a question that can only be answered with another question, this one posed to an imaginary audience: How many of us have sat in fast food parking lots eating our feelings?

And I, joining my made-up audience now, will answer. Me, me, pick me!

We all know that this is food has been engineered to taste good. And, perhaps more importantly, consuming it requires minimal engagement with the outside world. In a sit-down restaurant or in the supermarket, you must show yourself, your whole physical body, your mannerisms, your gait. You put yourself and your food choices on a stage for the world to witness. Nosy onlookers standing in line behind you, peering into your cart, watching your food travel a conveyer belt, each item a model strutting down a runway. Judge me, judge me.

But in the fast food world, you are free from these displays, these judgements. You are a disembodied voice. You are a head and shoulders. You are a hand forking over plastic or cash. You are taste, teeth, gnashing.

You are alone, but you are not alone.

If you’re one to embrace extreme proclamations, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Joey Hernandez is everything that is wrong with America. (Of course, you could also say that about Donald Trump or investment bankers or the alt-right or Westboro Baptist Church or Kim Kardashian. But they’re a different type of wrong. Trust me, there are many, many ways. We are nothing if not a melting pot.) To be more specific, Joey Hernandez is the embodied nightmare of every white liberal drinking kombucha in a Prius after an acro-yoga class. Joey probably shops at Walmart and un-ironically watches sitcoms with laugh tracks. He’s obese, drives around in an SUV, consumes copious amounts of fast food, makes videos of himself doing dumb shit, and posts these videos to the internet.

Hernandez isn’t rich, not one of those YouTube wunderkinds you read about. He started the YouTube channel when he was unemployed as a way to pass the time. According to a Bay Area News article, he’s still working a day job, unable to cut it on his YouTube income alone (though this more recent article suggests his channel has gotten more lucrative with time). He’s in his late 40s or early 50s.

But anyway, he comes across as a genuinely nice guy. Misguided, perhaps. But good, at his core. Although it’s sometimes clear that his heart isn’t always in the game — the deadened eyes give it away — he consistently puts on an act of good cheer. He bats his eyelashes, makes excited, “Woo woo woo!” sounds.

And for all his disingenuous theatrics, he appears genuinely thrilled before taking his first bite. He occasionally rates the food using arbitrary scales — sometimes out of 10, sometimes out of five. Regardless of which scale he uses, he usually rates food as a 4 or 5 out of 5, or as an 8, 9, or 10 of 10. This positivity stands in stark contrast to much of the reaction in the comments.

They say never read the comments. Whoever they are, they are wise.

The thing that is obvious but difficult to remember is that behind every reality TV show plot line and attention-garnering memoir and Instagram account and YouTube channel, there exists a real person, a human as similar to us as any other human, and as different. It takes moments like Kim Kardashian being robbed for us to remember, collectively, that she is a human, capable of and even susceptible to trauma, and not merely a brand or the butt of a joke (see, I still couldn’t resist).

My younger brother was the one who introduced me to Joey. We were hanging out and he said, “You have to see this video on YouTube.” That’s how we, as millennial humans, bond. He pressed play, and I was mesmerized. I asked him how the hell he’d found this channel, of all the YouTube channels in the world. Joey hadn’t gone viral or anything. At that time, he had 50,000 subscribers, but he’d been at it for a few years. My brother said he was looking for a review of an item from Lil’ Caesers on YouTube. My brother lives in Austin and is in a band and eats a lot of fast food, so I guess YouTube is where he gets his culinary recommendations. (We can’t all be worldly gastronomes.) He came across Joey’s review of the item in question and then just continued watching. Auto-play, sucking us down rabbit holes from which we never return.

I think it’s a mistake to assume that America has had its soul sucked dry by corporations. America never really had a soul to suck.

When I asked what drew him to the channel, my brother told me, “I just liked seeing someone genuinely enjoy their food.” And, he added, it was disturbing and fascinating, how hateful people were in the comments section. “Die, Fatty,” that kind of thing. Sexual comments too, which are weirder and somehow meaner. Robbing someone of their sexuality is cruel — I still remember the guy in my 11th grade history class who laughed when I said something about not having a boyfriend. Who said he couldn’t ever imagine me having sex or anything like that. I should’ve been glad he couldn’t imagine it, because that’d be creepy, but it unnerved me all the same. Made me feel like a blob of a person. A non-woman. A non-human.

There are other commenters who act more concerned. Do-gooders, they believe. These are the types who claim to care about Joey’s fitness, his health. The ones who imply that unless something changes, one day we are all going to log in to find that there are no new videos being uploaded. That one day, it’s all going to come to an abrupt end and all of us will know why.

I may be health conscious now, the kind of person who turns her nose up at most fast food, but this wasn’t always the case. I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s in a small town in north Texas named after a Confederate general. Back then, our town had very few sit-down restaurants — a couple of Mexican joints, an Italian restaurant, a smattering of homestyle steak-and-potatoes places.

My family didn’t dine out often. Aside from the lack of choice (we weren’t big Italian or steak-and-potatoes people), sit-down restaurants cost more, and you had to factor in the tip. For most of my upbringing, we didn’t have a lot of money. The prospect of having to leave a five dollar tip was a legitimate factor to consider.

So we ate fast food.

There are endless ways to define, or to remember, the seasons of youth. Friends, teachers, clothes, music. We all go through phases. We associate certain things with certain experiences. The devil is in the details, they say, but so is the self.

Dentists’ appointments or trips to the doctor meant getting to miss school, or going to school late, and that meant that our mom would take us to Burger King for breakfast. French toast dippers. Hash browns. The acidity of orange juice. The smell of grease, the feeling of it, the way it’d coat your skin, your hair, sink into your clothes, enveloping you. For only a few bucks, you’d get to smell like BK all day.

On long, boring summer afternoons, my brothers and I would beg our dad to take us to Dairy Queen. On three different visits to the Dairy Queen near our town square, we saw roaches crawling on the wall. There were two Dairy Queens in town and that one became known as the “roach Dairy Queen.” We still went there sometimes.

When I was in middle school, I’d go for rides with my mom and grandma to work their booth at a flea market about 20 miles away. I’d carry in pieces of vintage furniture and boxes of knickknacks procured at garage sales. I’d write out little price tags, using my neatest, tiniest handwriting. I’d rearrange items, always seeking the most attractive layout, imagining I was a visual merchandiser for a department store in New York and not just a small-town kid fiddling around in a second-hand store. My mom would usually come up behind me and re-do the displays, making them look 10 times better; she had a real knack for it. Afterwards, we’d all take turns washing our hands in the potpourri-scented flea market bathroom and then head over to the Arby’s across the parking lot, where my grandma would buy us cheddar melts, curly fries, and chocolate shakes.

Then things came full circle, as they do. My brothers and I all worked fast food jobs as teenagers. We wore stupid uniforms and worked tedious shifts and for our efforts we were paid minimum wage, or slightly more, and we got free food and/or employee discounts.

I used money from my job to buy my first car — a $500 Oldsmobile. It was a piece of shit, but I loved it. It had a CD player, and it provided me access to the outside world. Music. Freedom. Miles. It got me to my job and to school and to fast food restaurants, where I’d share meals and laughs with my friends. Where we made memories.

I don’t mean to suggest that we ate fast food all the time. It was probably only twice a week or so. There were many home cooked meals, or at least meals that were cooked at home but came from a box or kit. Hamburger Helper. Rice-A-Roni. Spaghetti. Tacos. We didn’t sit at a table and eat together like families on TV, but we’d watch the families on TV sit and eat together from our positions on the couch and living room floor.

Fast food is garbage. So is this YouTube channel. So am I. I’ve spent hours of my life watching an obnoxious stranger stuff garbage food into his pie hole. But to me, this food and the establishments that sell it are not just empty voids, sameness, all these franchises popping up across the country and around the world. They are evil and disgusting, yes, exploitative and greedy, of course, but I don’t know, man.

I think it’s a mistake to assume that America has had its soul sucked dry by corporations. America never really had a soul to suck. It is a country, a nation, arbitrarily drawn lines on a map, a figment of our collective imagination, the world’s most successful P.R. campaign, a lie.

We are the ones with the souls, and we carry them with us wherever we go. In drive-thrus and in plastic booths and all the way down bottomless YouTube rabbit holes.

Keep exploring the Internet Time Machine.