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The Most Popular Food Delivery Order In Each State During COVID-19

a pizza and chicken nuggets in a box

While we’ve all been home and not traveling due to the coronavirus pandemic, a bunch of us have been ordering food. Door Dash and Uber Eats to the rescue!

Welp, Yelp (that rhymes, y’know) has been paying attention to what we’ve been ordering from the restaurants that stayed open, and they figured out what were the things that each state ordered the most. It’s kind of an interesting look at our eating habits and how different states tend to have different, regional tastes.

First, how they figured it out. From Yelp:

To determine the Most Popular Delivery Order Unique to Every State During COVID-19, Yelp data scientist Samuel Hansen mined the text of dish names ordered since March 16, which marked the start of shelter-in-place orders across the nation. Specifically, Hansen employed a natural language processing technique called term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), which quantifies how frequently a dish is ordered in a state relative to its popularity in other states. After standardizing the dish names (e.g. truncating “2 pieces of fried chicken” to “fried chicken”), Hansen computed the TF-IDF scores for each dish in each state, in order to identify the top three dishes per state: the most regionally popular food-delivery items. Lastly, Hansen named one of the top three relatively popular items in each state as the state’s singularly popular delivery item.

Not surprisingly, pizza was the most popular food to be delivered. It was interesting that all 6 states (Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio) were either in the northeast or the midwest. But other foods, such as gyros, appeared to have their own groups of fans as well (Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, North Dakota). Overall, we really seem to like foods that have an (Americanized) Asian influence, with over 1/3 of our orders consisting of pad thai, General Tso’s chicken, sushi, etc. Decidedly “American” food was also well represented, with foods such as wings, burgers, crawfish and catfish all making the list.

Here are the listings for the 10 most populous states in the country:

And you can click here to see the rankings for all 50 states.

#stayhealthy #staysafe #washyourhands

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary

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