MINKA KELLY, the “sexiest woman alive,” slides a fork into a tangle of spaghetti carbonara. Zoë Saldana has a basket of fried calamari. Jennifer Lawrence, an Oscar nominee for her leading role in “Winter’s Bone,” wants it known that a skimpy morning repast is not going to satisfy her.

“I’m freakish about breakfast,” she explains to an Esquire magazine writer there to interview her. “You’re not gonna order, like, fruit or something, are you? Because I’m gonna eat.” We then learn that Ms. Lawrence “orders the eggs Benedict without looking at the menu.”

For regular readers of glossy magazines — which depend on interviews with famous people to generate chatter and goose newsstand sales — such situations have become increasingly familiar. (Especially over the last year or so, and most persistently in Esquire, the source of the three preceding examples, as well as Ms. Kelly’s November 2010 crown of sexiness.) A writer meets a starlet for breakfast, lunch or dinner. The starlet, usually of slim and gamine proportions, appears to thwart our expectations by ordering and consuming, with conspicuous relish, a meal that might satisfy a hungry dockworker.

Such passages are widespread enough in the pages of American periodicals that at least one longtime film publicist, Jeremy Walker, has coined a term of art for them: the documented instance of public eating, or DIPE. Consider, for example, Cate Blanchett impulse-ordering a side of Parmesan-fried zucchini at a restaurant in London and impishly telling a writer from Vogue that she doesn’t intend to share: “I think we’d each better get our own, or things could get ugly.”