People who drink milk with their dinner, consider Chinese takeout “exotic, ethnic cuisine,” prefer classic pasta shapes like spaghetti or linguini, and would take deep dish, thick crust pizza over thin, tend to be conservative voters.
Liberals, meanwhile, are more likely to have cooked a coconut lamb curry at home, snub their noses at fast food, drink wine with their dinner and consider Pan Asian/Fusion cuisine the haute of culinary sophistication.
Those are the conclusions, anyway, of Hunch.com, a New York-based site that collects data from web users and constructs “taste graphs” based on their preferences. Their report “Food Profiles of Self-Described Liberals vs. Conservatives” was posted online last week.
Among 350,000 Hunch users, 42 percent said they self-identified as liberals, while 17 percent said they veered more towards the conservative line. The balance said they were “middle of the road.'”
After executing complex algorithms and fancy digital footwork that dipped into the pool of Hunch user profiles surveys, what emerged are stark — perhaps even broadly stereotypical — caricatures of the liberal and conservative eater.
Overall, the data-gathering machine concluded that liberals are more cultured, open-minded, gourmet foodies compared to their meat-and-potato Conservatives.
Libs prefer bistro-style fries, for instance, while conservatives would rather gnaw on spuds from McDonald’s.
While liberals define a good, home-cooked meal as a lamb curry sputtering on the stove, a typical meal in a conservative home is a burger from the grill or comfort foods like tuna casserole or meatloaf.
More than half of liberals polled are more likely to have a glass of wine with their meal at home, while the same percentage of conservatives are more likely to pour a tall glass of milk to accompany their dinner.
Libs aren’t intimidated by lesser known or fancier pasta shapes like gnocchi, fusilli or radiatore, analysts say, compared to conservatives who stick to classics like spaghetti and linguine.
And while libs are more likely to enjoy a fine dining meal, conservatives say the experience is too fancy schmancy for their tastes.