Each State's Favorite Meal During Quarantine
They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and for many of us it's also one of the easiest to cook – assuming you count cereal. But what about the other most important meals of the day: lunch, dinner, and dessert? While many states have issued stay-at-home orders to combat the spread of COVID-19, searches for recipes have shot through the roof as people across the country have turned to Google for inspiring meal ideas. What type of recipes are people searching for? According to the data, that answer depends on where you live.
How We Determined Each State's Favorite Quarantine Meal
To discover each state's favorite meal during quarantine, we leveraged Google Trends data to compare how search popularity has changed across the country for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert recipes. We used the first half of March 2020 (1-15) as a baseline and compared it with the second half of the month (16-30), following the increase of safer-at-home and shelter-in-place policies.
Each search term's popularity was then compared by state and across the month to determine which recipe type saw the largest increase in search frequency relative to the rest of the country. In layman's terms, we determined which recipe type has gained the most popularity in each state since the stay-at-home orders began.
The map above and the table below list each state's favorite meal over the last couple of weeks, but here are a few of our favorite trends we uncovered along the way:
- Rhode Island has seen the largest surge in interest for breakfast recipes.
- Vermont has seen the largest surge in interest for lunch recipes as well as the largest decline in interest for dessert recipes.
- North Dakota takes the crown for dinner, narrowly edging out Massachusetts.
- Utah residents have the biggest sweet tooth of the bunch, seeing the biggest jump in searches for dessert recipes.
- South Carolina is the only state to record declines in popularity for all four recipe types. Lunch declined the least.
Each Meal, by the Numbers
Sources
- Google Trends. "Explore What the World is Searching." trends.google.com/trends/. 31 March 2020.
