Internet Time Machine
I’m Obsessed With a YouTube Fast Food Vlogger
Exploring the beauty of garbage food
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 A few of his older videos show him cooking in his home kitchen, with the limited counter space and outdated appliances that’d drive the yuppie house hunters on HGTV directly into an existential crisis.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…
