How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology | Hacker News Reader

How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology

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11 pointsraghus13 comments

I've noticed this before, although I've always wondered how much of it was just red state/blue state. (Or "lives in a major cosmopolitan city" versus "lives anywhere else", for that matter.) It would be interesting to see if there were any major differences after controlling for, e.g., geography, income, age, etc.

Given how closely correleated geography and political inclination are, and how closely correlated these food trends are to major-metro and small-medium-town, I'm not sure how seriously you could take these results at all.

I know plenty of conservatives in Chicago, and can identify no significant trend towards dislike of Thai and Sushi.

I don't know of a single Thai restaurant in western Michigan (a conservative stronghold, and where my family vacations).

This is the type of article that is destroying HN, we need to stop posting/upvoting articles like this.

1. It's not really interesting, or related to anything HN related. 2. It's sloppy thinking. 3. It promotes lots of meaningless speculation/arguments a la reddit.

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as someone new to HN (signed up earlier but started to heavily use recently), this is not the type of article I come to HN for. But i find myself attracted to them because they are easy to comment on and build rep on. and a kind of rep waterhole forms. So I am being incentivized to participate in something that lessens its value to me so that i can participate more in it.

I'm no statistician, but based on their "web poll"-style methodology, I'm not sure their results mean anything at all. They seem like they're at least one step above a CNN.com "do you like Obama?" poll, because users apparently have less idea about what questions they're going to answer. Hmm.

From the article:

15% answered "conservative"

54% answered "liberal"

31% answered "middle of the road"

Perhaps "conservative" is seen as slightly derogatory by some conservatives. Maybe the "middle of the road" conservatives got left out, because they see their views as mainstream.

Also, I would imagine that liberals are more likely to lie (or exaggerate) about preferring funky ethnic foods than conservatives.

I haven't read the report, though it might seem interesting if I had the time, but I would love to see more about the data between the groups. I want to see which relationship is the most causal one in food choice: political orientation, or possibly age.

When I heard the food choices I imagined age/lifestyle over political leaning. Older people are generally more conservative than younger people. Older people might also prefer old-fashioned comfort food and wooden kitchens.

Studies show that 51% of people like being polarized into two opposing groups.

Summary of the results:

If you are liberal, you eat overpriced, pretentious food.

If you are conservative, you eat bland, unhealthy food.

Hooray for reinforcing the expected stereotypes!

I'm going with it probably saying more about whether someone lives in a major metro area. Speaking from current personal experience, a lot of the "liberal" food just isn't available out here in the middle of nowhere. The political angle seems more like mild linkbait, along the lines of the semi-trollish but entertaining race/religion posts from OkCupid's blog a while back.

It seem that statist bias is unaccounted for. This mean libertarians/anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-commies are left out because they're anti-statists.

most intelligent people regardless of political persuasion tend to eat and live healthy. i can't decide if this study is intended to make us more stupid, to show that most people are stupid, or both.

That illustration is way off in the clothing styles. Today's conservative is the one more likely to be in a t-shirt at home. The stainless-steel kitchen liberal will be dressed like Steve Jobs.

I could say Most conservatives in the US are old, religious, and or poor. Then again I could also say the same thing about Democrats. The simple truth is belonging to any group with millions of other people says vary little about you other than the criteria for joining that group.

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