Favorite Pies in Each State
A look at preferences for various pies based on search history
World War II gave birth to the phrase, “As American as mom and apple pie,” forever conflating nationality with fruity pastry. Although Dutch apple pie recipes predate star-spangled identity by at least a couple centuries [1], you still can’t deny that apple pie is a favorite American dessert.
But among pies, is apple pie the favorite of Americans?
I set out to answer that question in honor of Pie Day (and Pi Day for those who care more about math than pastries). How could one be privy to such knowledge? Many food blogs and magazines have conducted polls to answer this question. But moving beyond small survey sample sizes, I wanted to know what Big Data can tell us about pies. I turned to Google for the answer.
Google Trends will give you instant comprehensive data on the popularity of a particular search term. So I used this to compare the popularity of internet searches in the last decade for different pies. These searches are presumably by people looking online for pie recipes and such. Here is a data visualization I created from the resulting data, sorted by state:
You may notice I’ve chosen to combine categories of pies here. That is because just like you can mess up a pie trying to cut into more than 7 or 8 slices, you can overdo a pie chart by including too many categories. So my apologies to those who see no relation between pumpkin and sweet potato pies, etc.
Speaking of which, pumpkin and sweet potato pies are both quite popular on their own, but even combined, they are not as popular as apple pie in many states. So on average, apple pie does reign supreme — like it or not (it’s not my favorite). But pumpkin pie doesn’t lag far behind, thanks in large part to Thanksgiving.
There were a few other notable differences in popularity. Regardless of how you pronounce it, pecan pie is more popular in the southeast where the native pecan trees are grown in abundance. Lemon meringue and key lime pies are also popular in the southeast, perhaps also for agricultural reasons if not because those pies are especially enjoyable on a warm and humid day. Northeastern states where berries grow wild tend to favor berry pies, as does Alaska. And for less clear reasons, northern states seem to show preference for banana and coconut cream pies while in the Midwest they really seem to like chocolate pie.
Methods and Limitations
The chart was made in Adobe Illustrator from data collated from Google Trends as noted, and sorted in Excel. I restricted the Google Trends data to the category of ‘Food and Drink,’ which I assume filters out unrelated searches for who-knows-what. One of the limitations of using Google Trends is that it only allows you to compare a maximum of five search terms. Since I couldn’t settle on limiting my comparison to five pies, I found a way to work around that. I ran three comparisons of five pies, and each run had one pie in it that also overlapped with one of the other runs. So, Run 1 had apple, sweet potato, pumpkin, pecan, and chocolate; Run 2 had chocolate, blueberry, strawberry, berry, and banana cream; and Run 3 had banana cream, coconut cream, rhubarb, key lime, and lemon meringue. Then, using some Excel math gymnastics, I normalized all the values. Does this approach have some limitations? Probably, and someone who knows a lot more than I do about statistics could likely tell you what those limitations are. Another limitation of using Google Trends is that there is no easy way to measure “other” pies that aren’t included in the data search, so there is no accounting for what fraction of other niche pies out there that people searched for (have you ever had a peanut butter pie? They are delicious). So there were several pies I could have included, but didn’t. Cherry and peach are more obvious examples that also come to mind. So my apologies to those, and any other pies I left off the list.
As always with everything else here on Cognitive Feedback Loop, my blog for my ramblings, this was a chance for me to try a new approach to what I do and maybe learn something in the process. So any feedback is always welcome.
Robert Lawrence illustrates data and writes about science. You can find his published work and more information at: www.robertlawrencephd.com
