🍔 Food & cooking

This is the category where tempers flare fastest, and that is no accident. Food touches childhood, region and upbringing: challenging the way someone eats is always, a little, challenging the house they came from. One careless word about a pastry is enough to split a table into two camps that had never counted themselves before.

What the debates gathered here share is that nobody has ever managed to close them, because they were never really about taste. The pineapple argument pits two attitudes to sweet-and-savoury against each other, even though both camps happily eat sweet-and-sour pork. The cuisine ranking pits national attachment against international reach. In each case the food is a convenient pretext for something else.

It is also the most international category on the site. A debate about bread baking stays local; a debate about what belongs on a pizza crosses every border and produces strikingly different results from one country to the next. On those matches, the gap between your country's score and the world score is often more interesting than the winner itself.

One note on what you will read here: the texts accompanying each match aim to establish facts, not to settle the argument. The Canadian origin of pineapple pizza, or which cuisines a neutral body has actually recognised, are verifiable — and they often change how people argue. Whether it tastes good remains entirely in the hands of the voters.

Expect this category to grow faster than any other. Food debates travel effortlessly: they need no translation, no context and no prior knowledge, which is exactly why the same handful of them resurface every few months on every social platform on earth. Breakfast, bread, cheese, coffee strength, the correct order of ingredients in a sandwich — each of them has divided households for generations without ever producing a settled answer.

They also make for unusually honest counters. Unlike a political or aesthetic preference, nobody needs to think before answering: you know instantly which side you are on, and you are unlikely to change your mind to look reasonable. That removes most of the social pressure that distorts opinion polls, and leaves something closer to what people actually do at home.