Food Trends From Across The US Are Weird : What Americans Order Most Off Their State's Menu
If you’re in Philadelphia for the day, you’re going to Pat’s King of Steaks or Geno’s Steaks. That’s just the rules. Cheesesteaks are what the city is known for, after like, liberty or something. Or at least that’s what so many us have been led to believe.
Co.Design teamed up with Food Genius, a food industry analytics firms, to scour the 88,000 menus (that’s 59 million menu items) in order to unearth the top-ordered ingredients and food dishes from across United States. Cheeseteaks, it turns out, is all New Jersey.
Researchers rearranged their results into an interactive map that labels the most distinctive food by state. As Jersey single-handedly ruins everything we’ve ever known, the number one ordered menu item in Philly is actually the hoagie sandwich.
What other weird foods are Americans eating? A lot of prawn on the West Coast, ranch dressing in the Northwest, and seafood on the East Coast: crab cake, clam, and haddock. When you hover over each state on the map, you can see the top five ingredients and dishes ordered alongside their percent difference (cheesesteak comes after hoagie in Philly). Researchers also made note of the difference between a term’s frequencies on menus in states versus the U.S. as a whole.
However, cheesesteaks and other frequently ordered meat dishes, like chicken tenders, burgers, and cutlets, may soon disappear from every menu after a recent study published in Nature Climate Change found these trends perpetuate climate change.
"The average efficiency of livestock converting plant feed to meat is less than three percent, and as we eat more meat, more arable cultivation is turned over to producing feedstock for animals that provide meat for humans,” Bojana Bajzelj, lead study author from the University of Cambridge's Department of Engineering, said in a press release. In layman’s terms, Bajzelj said as humans globally eat more meat, the process of converting plants to food becomes less efficient and releases more greenhouse gases. Cutting back on meat consumption is a way to reverse these effects.
So Americans might want to use the map to take cues from other states with vegetarian as a top menu item (California because avocados) or who seem to only eat cheesy dips with chips and ranch dressing (we're looking at you, Idaho and Kansas City). North Dakota doesn't actually rank for dishes so much as they do ingredients. Maybe their blended, perfect, smothered, zesty, and sugar-heavy menus are meatless. Who knows?