Back at the innocent dawn of social media, the intellectually superior would say: “Why would I want to read about what someone had for breakfast?” like it was the most absurd thing ever. But it turns out that is exactly what I want to read. That, plus what they had for second breakfast, lunch, the feral fridge raids, and midnight toasties. I can’t stop reading other people’s food diaries: they are irresistible – digital Pringles – but also long and full of unexpected details, like a marathon tasting menu. I can lose hours, emerging guilty and absolutely starving from my food-snooping fugue state.
I am a pretty indiscriminate consumer. The person doesn’t need to be famous – it is intriguing, sure, but the pressure on non-civilians to look a certain way means their diets are often a samey mix of woo-woo and roughage. I enjoy being baffled by taralli or muffuletta (savoury Sicilian biscuits and a New Orleans sandwich, apparently) and wondering what a “popover with strawberry butter” tastes like, but the food doesn’t have to be interesting. You had potato waffles, a glass of water and a Fibre Now brownie, you say? Tell me more.
The sheer volume of “what I eat” material proves there is a market beyond me. Print food diaries are just an amuse-bouche for an all-you-can-watch buffet of TikToks from intuitive eating influencers, muscular men “shredding” with mountains of chicken breasts, people recovering from eating disorders (and a few clearly still in their grip), Michelin groupies, street food obsessives and ordinary people making toast.
I often wonder if I am missing something, avidly swiping. When I was investigating weird TikTok food earlier this year, I discovered a woman who forensically analysed videos, pulling out obscure sexual messaging like a 17th-century witchfinder would claim a mole or sour milk as signs of sorcery. She may have infected me, but a lot of it feels quite fetishy, particularly “mukbang” content – videos of slim, attractive people eating vast quantities – and lingering shots of spurting egg yolks and cream doughnuts.
So are food diaries actually a (my) fetish? I am extremely “food motivated”, as they say about animals in training, so snooping on what others eat is a greedy pleasure. I can only eat so many meals and it’s a way of vicariously eating thousands more. But I enjoy diaries as much when they are full of food I would hate – such as pigs’ feet with “cheddar scum” or Dr Pepper ice-cream. A little frisson of disapproval or disgust actually adds to the pleasure: “Sweets for breakfast? Two cocktails on a Monday? A raw broccoli omelette?” I whisper to myself, pleasantly scandalised, or simply: “That sounds revolting.”
It goes beyond food. There is a profusion of sex, grooming, shopping and money diaries that are equally fascinating. I would read all of those too if there were enough hours in the day; I enjoy the minutiae of other people’s lives so much I wonder if there’s any diary I wouldn’t read. Bin diary, stool diary? Nope, I would devour those too.
I have two theories, one melancholy, the other cheerier. First, if you have ever worked in an office, then you have overheard thousands of “What’s for lunch?” conversations, either in annoyance or avidly eavesdropping. Adrift in the world of corporate law in my 20s, I found that a great solace, but now I work alone, like so many. Perhaps isolation is making us hungry for what we involuntarily consumed when we lived and worked more around others: the soothing burble of different lives. That is one explanation of mukbang’s popularity: it stems from loneliness and a desire to reproduce a lost feeling of the communal.
The other is that we are simply and quite benignly interested in each other. We want to know how other people live and what makes them tick in tiny ways: what their McDonald’s order is, or what they always have in the freezer. If curiosity about the infinite world of human variety is a fetish, it seems a fairly harmless one. But of course I would say that. Now tell me: what did you have for breakfast?
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
