The sound ofpeople eating, chewing, enjoying food makes me sleepy, which is unfortunate, considering that I cook for a living. I’ve had this, let’s call it “gift,” for as long as I can remember. It could have been anything: my father’s snacking on salted peanuts while watching the Golf Channel; a classmate’s opening a bag of chips in the library, crinkling the crispy polypropylene; the clickety-clacking of a lozenge around the mouth of my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Smith, while she explained an assignment, each word trailing off in my ears as I fell asleep at my desk. Though I didn’t know it at the time, these eating sounds gave me a relaxing, tingling sensation in my brain, an auditory-tactile synesthesia that scientists call A.S.M.R., or autonomous sensory meridian response. For me, that response is instantaneous somnolence.
I always thought I was a freak. I didn’t have a name for what I thought was a medical condition until 2012, when I stumbled upon a black-screen YouTube video of a young man eating a taco bowl. When I came to, an hour later, I had a name for it. Soon after that, I started making A.S.M.R. videos myself, under a pseudonym. There were a handful of us: Natalie, Cosita, Matthew, Lizzy and me — a small group of anonymous A.S.M.R.tists (what we called ourselves) who ate food in front of the camera for thousands of people a night. Today there are hundreds of accounts dedicated to A.S.M.R. eating-sounds videos. Likely stemming from the popularity of Korean mukbangs, or eating broadcasts, a vibrant community of public chewers was born. And Lizzy was the queen, the most famous of us, with one of her videos hitting more than six million views.
I became internet friends with Lizzy (known to thousands as SassEsnacks) after finding her channel in 2014. Her YouTube videos almost always started the same way: first, a text screen warning people with misophonia, an extreme hatred of sounds like chewing and repetitive tapping; the camera facing her and framed so that you can only see the bottom half of her face. In one of her most popular videos — and my favorite — she eats a slice of grocery-store chocolate cake. She describes a cake she used to make, one with cooked cherries in the center. “I like other cakes,” she says, “but my favorite is chocolate with chocolate frosting.”
I developed a chocolate-cake recipe in honor of her. Lizzy died of pancreatic cancer in 2019, foreshadowed by the stomach pain she talked about in some of her later videos. I never met her in person, but I texted her almost every day for years. She was one of my best friends. She had even moved from California to Georgia, my home state and where my family still lives, to be closer to her sister, Jane. (The sisters’ pseudonyms, Lizzy and Jane, came from one of Lizzy’s favorite novels, “Pride and Prejudice.”)
Most of our text exchanges involved my career switch from eating on camera to cooking on camera and how funny that was, and her big move. Lizzy wasn’t the type to get excited about much, but she was excited to start a new life in a bigger house with a bigger yard and quieter neighbors so that she could make her videos in peace. I always thought that I would have lunch with her someday, and that my dog, Quentin Compson, would become friends with hers, Mr. Darcy. She was an incredibly private person, and her real name is, to this day, unknown to the public. If you knew her full name, she considered you part of her inner circle, Jane told me years later.
If Lizzy were here today, I would bake her this cake. The dark chocolate-cherry flavor is enhanced by Dutch-processed cocoa powder, which produces a much deeper, Oreo-like chocolatiness than regular unsweetened cocoa powder. The cherry comes in three forms, two real (the glossy layer of cherry preserves between the cake and frosting, plus the fresh fruit on top) and one virtual (the almond extract, which is made from bitter almonds and is in the same family as cherries, hence the copycat flavor). When you put something real against something virtual, then the whole thing feels somehow hyperreal, like my internet friendship that came and went, leaving behind only a trace in the form of stale text messages. It’s different from an in-person friendship; there are few ways to grieve the loss of something like this.
I’ve had trouble sleeping lately. Sometimes I turn on one of Lizzy’s videos and feel close to her again. They’re a reminder of the weird, random, beautiful secret lives we led eating in front of the camera so thousands of strangers could relax, fall asleep and feel less alone. I no longer make videos, but even now, years later, when something funny happens to me or I come across an A.S.M.R. video I love (or want to make fun of), my fingers want to text her, “What do you think of this?” There were so many questions I didn’t get to ask her before the cancer. When she died suddenly, I felt conflicted about my grief. Was I allowed to grieve for someone I had never even met?
Jane told me that the morning she died, Lizzy visited several people in their dreams. I haven’t dreamed about her yet, but whenever I turn on her videos — whether it’s the chocolate cake or something else — I know that after I’ve dozed off and then awakened, I’ll be that much more rested and ready to tackle the day. For insomniacs everywhere, that was her gift.
Recipe: Chocolate-Cherry Cake
