If the Democratic primaries were a sporting event, they would look something like an ultra-marathon followed by a series of punishing wind sprints. Campaign staff spend a full year door-knocking, phone-banking and organizing in Iowa and New Hampshire before setting off on a mad dash through the parts of the country where 98% of Americans actually live.

Staying competitive in this feat of endurance requires fueling your foot soldiers. So what are the campaigns feeding their staff and what, if anything, does it tell us about them?

Campaigns are required to submit detailed records of their spending to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) each quarter, showing how much money they raised from donors – and what they spent it on. We used those filings to analyze the remaining candidates’ expenditures on all things edible – from Starbucks coffee runs and airplane snacks to and steakhouse dinners and pizza pies. This analysis covers spending from each campaign’s launch through 31 December 2019.

A caveat: each campaign uses slightly different categorizations in its FEC filings. We excluded expenditures if they included event space rentals or appeared to refer to catering for fundraising events. This decision primarily affected the analyses for the Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden and Andrew Yang campaigns, since Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg are not holding high-dollar fundraisers.

Overall, we examined $1.9m in spending on food and beverages by these eight campaigns. Here’s what we found.

MVP cuisines

About $1m of that spending went to catering companies or restaurants that we characterized as generally American. Of the other $900,000, Mexican food was the top choice. Democratic campaigns spent $92,120 at Mexican restaurants throughout 2019, led by the Warren campaign, which accounted for more than a third of that total.

Soul food and barbecue were popular choices in South Carolina, another state with an early primary. Andrew Yang, whose parents emigrated to the US from Taiwan, spent the most on Chinese food, followed by Tom Steyer, Warren, Biden and Sanders. Yang’s campaign was also the only one to show expenditures from Korean and Creole restaurants.

The Warren and Sanders campaigns also demonstrated notable diversity in their choices. Sanders staffers shelled out for Thai, Jamaican and Middle Eastern food. Warren workers dined on Filipino, vegan, Thai and Indian food.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s campaign dominated the spending on Japanese food, shelling out $16,877 at a single sushi restaurant in the six weeks after he launched his run in late November. That restaurant, Hanabi Japanese Cuisine, is just a few blocks away from the Bloomberg Philanthropies offices, which are housed in a 19th-century Italianate mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (The Bloomberg campaign is paying rent to the Bloomberg Philanthropies building, according to the filings.)

Lest you think the campaign blew all that money in one sitting, Hanabi is no Nobu. The storefront restaurant offers specialty rolls at prices ranging from just $7 to $13.

How the 0.01% eats

Bloomberg staffers might have a taste for mid-range sushi, but his campaign is not exactly pinching pennies when it comes to meals. Despite only having launched in late November, the campaign has already spent about $310,000 on food. Most of that went to office catering services, but one notable line item was more than $10,000 to Air Culinaire, an in-flight catering service for private jets. Options for travelers out of New York range from a seared wagyu steak with foie gras, morels and potato hash to sous-vide black chicken thighs with green onion salad, beetroot puree, jasmine tea-infused rice and sesame dressing. Each menu also features extensive options from Petrossian Caviar, Air Culinaire’s “caviar partner”.

The other self-funding billionaire in the race, Steyer, spent more than half a million dollars on food and beverages. Much of that spending went to catering and restaurants, but there were also some notable expenditures:

$14,474 on fruit delivery

$23,562 on a premium “third wave” office coffee service, and

$31,428 on delivery apps, including $20,731 just on the grocery delivery service Instacart

Back to reality

For those campaign workers who don’t work for billionaires, however, meals of pizza, sandwiches and bar food were much more common.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest What’s Joe Bitin’? The former vice-president with a stack of pizzas. Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

The Sanders campaign spent the most on pizza – about $30,000 – while Domino’s racked up the most orders of any pizzeria.

America’s most disappointing sandwich chain, Panera Bread, meanwhile, accounted for $50,450 in spending across all the campaigns.

Breakfast of champions

Campaign staff typically work exceptionally long hours, and you can’t make it through the day without a strong breakfast. The most popular breakfast choice was Dunkin’ Donuts, followed by a number of bagel shops and Starbucks.

The Buttigieg campaign also spent $2,160 at a specialty croissant bakery in northern California.

Sweet tooth

As for afters, two campaigns dominated the dessert menu – Klobuchar’s and Sanders’. The Minnesota senator spent more than $10,000 at the Cookie Cart, a Minneapolis not-for-profit bakery that provides job training for teenagers.

Meanwhile, Sanders’ campaign has spent $13,837 on Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. He is from Vermont, after all.