Mark Wahlberg wakes up at 2.30am to work out, then eats oats, peanut butter, blueberries and eggs at 3.15am for breakfast. Nicola Peltz Beckham gets a coffee delivered every morning. Jason Sudeikis has an Emmy, but still has to deal with limited lunch options at work.

I know all this because these celebrities have participated in the endless stream of “What I Eat in a Day” videos, a genre of content that I consume as hungrily as Hillary Clinton snacks on raw jalapenos.

Jennifer Lawrence says she likes eating spaghetti sandwiched between pizza slices.Credit: AP

Public food diaries aren’t anything new. We’ve always been interested in what famous, or famous-ish, people eat. In his posthumously published autobiography, Benjamin Franklin shared a detailed documentation of his vegetarian stage (and the issues it caused at 18th century dinner parties).

When Buffalo Bill wrote the story of his life a century later, he included a menu from a hunting trip that included a salmi of prairie dog.

Even Elvis, one of the most iconic artists of all time, is almost as well known for his peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwiches as he is for his music and costumes.

Our fascination with what others digest isn’t hard to process. Humans are voyeurs, always peering into each other’s handbags or bathroom cabinets. And nothing tells you more about a person than the contents of their pantry and refrigerator. But in the past few years, this curiosity has bloomed into a full-blown social obsession.

Harper’s Bazaar dominates in this category with their celebrity Food Diaries, where stars like Grimes share fun factoids, like the time her hair stopped growing because she ate nothing but spaghetti for two years. But the competition to break news over how many almonds hot people eat stretches from People to New York Magazine. Bon Appetit’s “The Receipt” column explores the intersection of food and money. More commonly, these offerings simply exist to tell us who is buying $20 collagen smoothies.

On social media, the opinions are even more overwhelming. Across Instagram and TikTok you can track the entire human condition under the #WIEIAD hashtag, which has over seven billion views. Here there are fewer celebrities singing the praises of hemp seeds and more normal people trying to work out what “girl dinner” means.