: A traditional soup from Hamburg. Interestingly, the name originally meant "all soup" (referring to leftover ingredients) rather than containing eel, though eel is now a standard ingredient. Cebu’s Famous Eel Soup

Due to the shock video’s notoriety, search results for "eel soup" are often a mix of the meme and actual food. If you are looking for legitimate culinary content, these are the most common viral "eel soups":

Unlike a crab or a lobster, an eel is serpentine. Its movements are mammalian in their twisting desperation. Viewers project human-like fear onto the eel. Watching it rise from the boiling liquid is visually analogous to a drowning victim breaking the surface. This triggers a strong empathetic response: we want the eel to win, even though we know it is destined for dinner.

Therefore, the video is "real" in the sense that the footage is authentic—it is not CGI or stop-motion. But it is "fake" in the sense that the eel is not alive. It is a corpse experiencing muscular spasms.