Math Proves Bacon Is a Miracle Food-For Real

WIRED partnered with Food Network and crunched 49,733 recipes and 906,539 comments from their massive website. The result is a fascinating overview of how Americans cook.

Comparing the Biggest Food Fads

Food is so personal and subjective that we’re always talking about it in vague and imprecise ways. But one of the many amazing things you can with big-ish data is give precise questions to answers that always seemed so subjective. Take, for instance, the question of bacon. Everything is always better with bacon, right? But if so, how much? And are any foods actually worse with bacon?

We calculated the answer, following a simple methodology that made the most of the 906,539 ratings on foodnetwork.com. First, we searched out all the recipes that fit a certain description-—sandwiches, for example. Then, we calculated the average rating for those foods if they did not include the word “bacon.” We ran the numbers again using only recipes that did include bacon. The results were pretty great. Of all the foods we analyzed, bacon lends the most improvement to sandwiches. Many other foods also benefitted. In fact, we found that when you crunch the data for all recipes, those with bacon do in fact rate higher.

No surprises here! There are plenty of reasons why sandwiches might benefit the most; their slapped-together construction allows the bacon to stay crispy. Things get a little more dicey in salads and vegetables, which can let the bacon get soggy. The only foods that get worse with bacon? Pasta and desserts. An educated guess: It’s because bacon pastas are typically finicky cream sauces that are difficult to get right. And desserts often seem to render bacon fat into a congealed mess.

The bacon experiment led us down a whole branch of questions: Could we total how much chicken there is on the entire site? What about how many testicles? Could we figure out how many miles of spaghetti there are? Yes, yes, and yes! (The answers are in the charts above.) But one thing we really wanted to know was: What foods are most popular now, and how has food popularity waxed and waned over time? We looked at the rates of comments on eight faddish foods:

Big Food Fads, Over Time

Interest in these 8 foods has waxed and waned over time.

We calculated these by first finding the total number of reviews for each food. Then, we figured out what percentage of those reviews came in each quarterly period since 2007. (That arithmetic allowed us to normalize the data—-otherwise, this thing would be a huge bacon chart and everything would look tiny.) Perhaps the most surprising thing is how much the answers conform to anecdotal evidence from pop culture. Low-carb diets and Portobello burgers were totally a mid-2000’s thing. And sure enough, their popularity was tanking by 2007. Similarly, if you live on the coasts, you’ve probably found more and more restaurants and haute grocery stores touting quinoa. The trend is very recent. Bacon, though? Bacon’s always been popular, though things have accelerated ever since it’s become a full-blown meme.