Have you heard about the #AfricanFoodChallenge? Meet the man behind it

The #AfricanFoodChallenge has Africans engaging enthusiastically in Mukbang.

We told you all about the people taking advantage of Mukbang ASMR to turn bad table manners into a source of income.

Now, the Internet is awash with several videos of Africans eating traditional food and clearly enjoying themselves while doing it.

This is the story behind #AfricanFoodChallenge.

The hashtag involves several Africans engaging in Mukbang — an act that originated in South Korea — which involves people filming themselves eating huge platters of food while their viewers derived some sort of pleasure from it.

Mukbang fans get pleasure from watching ordinary people consume extraordinary amounts of food.

The #AfricanFoodChallenge originated from the @Africanfoods account on Instagram, run by Felix Akintunde, who started posting videos of himself eating around August 2014. We caught up with him for a chat about his origin story.

After Felix saw Mukbangers from Japan and China captivating people on the Internet with their traditional food, he sought diversification by incorporating African food. "I said why not try the African version," he says. "To promote African food in a grand style, to show how it's done in Africa."

Since then, he has acquired quite a number of followers who love watching him eat and give him great feedback. "The comments are really awesome," he says. "[There are] a lot of positive comments and energy. In fact, they love every post and want me to do more."

This feedback led him to make his content as interactive as possible, making him introduce the #AfricanFoodChallenge, which has people all over the country contributing videos of themselves eating native food.

Celebrities participated and reposted such videos on their pages, giving the movement even more reach. Felix says he couldn't believe the amount of people who participated in the challenge. "It was amazing," he says.

He also took this challenge to the streets, to include the less privileged in Mukbang. When asked about this, Felix replied, "It has been one of my goals to extend love to them by giving them food. They are part of us and we can't ignore them. Most of them don't have the regular meals we have. They survive fay by day having a little to eat. I am really willing to do more if i have more if I have the strength."

We wondered if Felix's love for eating extends to the kitchen, so we asked him about it. Despite having a restaurant of his own, he modestly responded, "I'm not a bad cook. I try myself, I learnt my skills from my grandmother — home made Naija content. The only problem I have is cooking for a large number of people. But I do pretty well cooking for 3-5 people."

Mukbang does not end at just eating. Mukbang stars usually take it a step further by adding Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) which is the physical pleasurable tingling you get from head/scalp, down the spine and through your limbs. Mukbang ASMR combines the pleasure of watching people consume large quantities of food with the relaxing feeling of eating sounds.

Felix Akintunde, founder of African Foods [Instagram/Africanfoods] Pulse Nigeria

Felix hopes to add ASMR to his content as soon as possible. "I don't want it to end in my bedroom or just Nigeria," he says. "I want to take the eating across Africa and visit other countries. I'm trying to save to get a microphone so that the eating sounds can come out well."

If you were to upload a video of yourself eating, what African food would it be?