The Most Popular Super Bowl Foods In Every State

While our nation's biggest food festivity is undoubtedly Thanksgiving, what would your guess be for the No. 2 celebration for when we all gather together with family and friends to feed our faces? Sure, Christmas dinner tends to involve mountains of food, and Easter often features a big meal in addition to all of that candy. There are also all those backyard barbecues on Memorial Day, Labor Day, and points in between. None of these, however, has us in quite such a frenzy of food preparation (or at least takeout-ordering) as Super Bowl Sunday. According to data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the football (and commercial) watching rite of winter is the second-biggest food holiday on the calendar.

If there was one official food of Super Bowl Sunday, that food would probably be beer. Hundreds of millions of gallons of the stuff pass through our bellies, inevitably leading to what NYC Water (via Medium) calls a "drastic uptick" in water usage at halftime as toilets everywhere are pressed into use to accommodate the overflow. As far as what we're nibbling while we chug, preferences vary from state to state. Google Trends crunched 2021's numbers and came up with a wide array of dishes ranging from traditional to trendy. (Absent from the list, though, were snackadiums, since who's got the time to build one of those?) Let's take at look at the food preferences for all 50 states during the Super Bowl.  

Another one of the basic game day food groups is, of course, the cheese group. There does tend to be quite a bit of crossover between cheese and other categories, such as the cheeseburgers favored by California. The Golden State, doesn't want just any old cheeseburgers, though. Instead, they want cute little sliders, just like the ones they make at White Castle. Too bad that chain has no locations in California, so they might have to make their own.

In Nebraska, they're really into the yogurt cheese known as labneh. South Dakota prefers something from south of the border: queso blanco, or, as Google Trends refers to it, white queso. We're not sure whether they do a homemade version or just order to go from Chipotle, though. In Ohio, they prefer to keep things old school with a cheese ball, most likely with a side of sturdy crackers. If you'd like to snack like the Buckeye State, we have recipes for a delicious cranberry-orange cheese ball, as well as a cheeseball shaped like a pumpkin and one molded into the form of a skull. With very minimal tweaking, you could make them into cheesy footballs, instead.

Oddly enough, there was only one state that was really interested in yet another classic game day food: nachos. Google Trends reports that this dish was tops in Maine during the last Super Bowl, but we suspect that they may have come in a solid second in quite a few other states, as well. Nachos, after all, are awesome — except they are kind of messy when you eat them, so perhaps they lose a few points with people who own light-colored couches. Still, it's not like wings are significantly less messy, so maybe that's not it.

Another strike that nachos have against them, especially in a situation where they are likely to be sitting out for a while, is that the chips do have a tendency to get soggy under the weight of all those toppings. If you choose extra-sturdy chips, though, and take some care creating your layers and selecting less-goopy toppings, then you (and the entire state of Maine) should be able to create the perfect nachos for the big game.

Everybody loves pasta, but to most of us, it's always seemed like more of a sit-down meal than something you eat in front of the TV as it tends to get kind of messy. Well, New Hampshire begs to differ, as per Google Trends. Perhaps they know something we don't in the Granite State when it comes to balancing a plate of lasagna on their laps as they watch the big game. Garfield (the cartoon cat, not the 20th president of the United States) would be so proud.

In Oregon, they like their pasta in a broth, as their game day pick is the soup known as pasta fagioli. If you're unfamiliar with it, for starters, it's actually pronounced pasta fazool — yes, it's that stuff Dean Martin sings about in "That's Amore." Pasta fagioli is a hearty vegetable/bean soup, but, as the name implies, it's also chock full of short, chunky pasta.

Even though it's not a finger food, one perennially popular Super Bowl meal is chili. Chili is a dish that could actually put forth a case for being one of the great American foodstuffs. There's Greek-influenced Cincinnati chili (5-way for the win!), there's the classic Texas "bowl of red" without a bean in sight, there's white chili, chili verde, and about as many other variants and "secret ingredients" as there are cooks. While Google Trends didn't specify exactly what kind of chili they favored, the states of Colorado, Massachusetts, and Tennessee were all searching for chili recipes for their Super Bowl parties in 2021.

In Kentucky, however, they go a slightly different route. Rather than chili, they fill their bowls with spicy jambalaya. While this dish is more often associated with Louisiana, perhaps the Bayou State sees it as an everyday thing, whereas for the Bluegrass State it's definitely party food. No matter whether you opt for the creole or Cajun version, jambalaya is both tasty and filling and is something that will stick to your ribs through all four quarters of the game.

Only two states eschewed the usual meat and cheese options in favor of something a little more fishy. Oddly enough, one of these states, Illinois, is pretty much landlocked, unless you consider the fact that it sits on the shore of a Great Lake. Still, Lake Michigan isn't really known for its seafood. WBEZ notes that there are fish in there, true, but there are also a frightening number of pollutants. Per Google Trends, the Prairie State's Super Bowl pick is a Cajun seafood boil, something that is typically made with crawfish, shrimp, or maybe crab. None of these types of seafood can be found in great abundance in the Midwest, but they are super-tasty, so we're not going to fault Illinois for their failure to eat local. They won't be watching local, either, as Pro Football Reference reminds us that the Bears' last appearance in the big game was 2007. (They lost to the Colts then, too.)

Delaware, on the other hand, is a coastal state, but they're also probably importing the seafood they'll be using. The dish Delaware favors for Super Bowl snacking is prawn toast, and shrimping isn't a big industry in the Blue Hen State. It doesn't matter to us, though. Prawn toast (or shrimp toast) is delicious, if not too nutritious.

If something is trending on Google Trends, that, by definition, makes it trendy, right?  Well, the favorite 2021 Super Bowl food of Idaho, Mississippi, and Nevada, happened to be a food that was particularly popular last year and continues to grow in popularity: birria tacos. They're not all that new, really, as their roots date back over 50 years, but they've been gaining a lot of traction lately due to having been deemed highly Instagram-worthy by the mysterious cabal who determines such things. Trendy they may be, but they are also tasty, so good choice, you three states!

Three more states, those being Indiana, Oklahoma, and Virginia, opted for another intensely Instagrammed food: charcuterie boards. Sure, people have been eating deli meats and cheeses for eons, and even piling them on plates with crackers and perhaps a few grapes or apple slices. In recent years, though, charcuterie boards seem to have evolved into a competitive sport where people fight to outdo each other with OTT presentations. In fact, a football-themed charcuterie board like this one from Smack of Flavor is almost like a 2-D version of a snackadium, so maybe people in the Hoosier, Sooner, and Old Dominion States do have time on their hands, after all.

It's not really all that surprising that most people's favorite football foods aren't exactly a nutritionist's dream. Meaty things, melty things, crunchy things, ooey-gooey sticky sweet things, these are what we're craving as we settle in for a long evening of watching the year's biggest sporting event — not to mention, the year's best commercials. There is one state, however, that does give a nod to a vegetable for its Super Bowl pick, the state being North Dakota and the veggie being the sturdy, serviceable bell pepper. North Dakotans don't eat these peppers plain, though. (Who would?) Instead, Google Trends indicates that they prefer to stuff them with a hearty filling to turn them into a tasty main dish.

Stuffed peppers typically contain a mixture of rice, ground beef, and seasonings, perhaps cooked in a tomato sauce and maybe incorporating some other veggies like onions or corn. Oh, and don't forget the delicious melted cheese topping that is the stuffed pepper's crowning glory! While stuffed peppers might seem like a surprising pick for a game day snack, the peppers make perfect edible bowls for a meal that's both neat and complete.