What's The Most Frequently Ordered Takeout In Your State?

As we all know by now, the Time of Corona has also become the Time of Takeout, an era when just about everything—even meals prepared by Michelin-starred kitchens—is available for you to carry off in paper bags to your own kitchen table. But what are Americans carrying out? Pizza seems like the most obvious answer, but the folks at Yelp don't trust conventional wisdom. They want data.

And so data scientist Samuel Hansen crunched the numbers—mined from Yelp, of course—to determine the most popular takeout order in every state in the union. Well, actually, he let the numbers determine the top three and then chose the official number-one takeout order himself.

Some of the orders were not surprising: like many of my fellow Illinoisans, I have been ordering lots of thin-crust pizza over the past 10 weeks. Others are more surprising. Who knew Alaskans had such a collective fondness for gumbo? (I'm sure any gumbo-loving Alaskans reading this will be more than happy to set me straight.) But hey, here's something to argue over without raising your blood pressure too much. We could all use that right now.