Northwestern’s Chinese Students Association hosted cooking influencer Kenny Song for its Winter Quarter speaker event in Harris Hall on Monday evening.
Song, who has garnered 3.5 million followers on Instagram and 2.4 million followers on TikTok, produces short-form cooking videos on social media.
CSA’s programming chairs, SESP sophomore Angelina Mo and Weinberg junior Maddie Wang, organized and moderated the event.
The event featured a Q&A session with Song and a live mystery-box style cooking competition between Song and a team of two NU students who were randomly chosen beforehand to participate.
Song and the team of two students were asked to cook a dish out of the ingredients in a box of random items, including rotisserie chicken, a bag of Lay’s potato chips, an apple and cucumbers.
“We had never done something as ambitious as a cooking competition before,” Mo said. “With this speaker event, we really wanted to switch it up by adding a more fun, dynamic element to it.”
During the Q&A session, Song said he started posting cooking videos after he applied to work for food content creators on YouTube and never heard back.
“I was trying to do video editing,” Song said. “I always liked video editing as a kid. I couldn’t wait anymore, so I posted my first video.”
When he first started producing content, Song said he filmed and edited everything himself. Now, though he has his own cameraman, he said editing some of his videos can take up to two weeks.
Song’s catchphrase that he says at the end of his videos is “You want some?” — stylized as “uwansum?”
He said he came up with it after a friend told him to be more interactive in his videos.
“I cringe every time after I say it,” Song said. “When I’m filming the videos, I try my best to get the best shot, so I’m saying that so many times.”
Weinberg first-year Jonathan Lee said he enjoys watching cooking content, including Song’s videos.
He said he was excited to see someone he has only seen online in real life.
“I thought the highlight of this event would be to see the cooking competition, because obviously it’s what Kenny is known for, so just being able to see someone cook in action,” Lee said.
Song said he started producing cooking videos after realizing that he didn’t want to go to graduate school, which was his original intended path.
He said being a content creator making cooking videos has given him “the most unexpected opportunities.”
“I’m so happy to be here, to be able to travel and do what I love,” Song said. “I feel like every day I’m working at making better videos and making people impressed. I feel like that is the true pinnacle of what I could ever imagine.”
Email: [email protected]
X: @_ktnguyen
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