Professionally shot videos of elderly villagers preparing, cooking, and serving food to hundreds of people are uploaded to YouTube and watched by 4 million subscribers. It is transforming a remote village in western Bangladesh.
These videos depict a community kitchen in Shimulia which produce gargantuan quantities of food. These extravagant meals include a 106 KG Tuna, a 185-pound vanilla cake, or a 650-pound water buffalo, 50 country ducks, etc.
The channel behind this operation is called AroundMeBD, and its success has created a whole new economy in Shimulia, which has since been dubbed the YouTube village of Bangladesh.
Delwar Hussain, a 40-year-old schoolteacher from Shimulia, helps run the channel launched by his nephew and business partner, Liton Ali Khan in 2016 who owns a cyber café in capital city Dhaka.
The YouTube village is a prominent example of a niche but is also part of a growing online trend across South Asia: As the internet reaches villages, rural societies are finding ways to showcase and monetize their unique food cultures to audiences across the world, using platforms like YouTube and Facebook. In Pakistan, Village Food Secrets has 3.5 million subscribers. More here.
