The COVID-19 pandemic has altered people’s lives around the world. By mid-May 2020, 2.5 billion people or more than one-third of the global population, had been asked or ordered to stay at home by their governments to prevent the spread of the deadly virus.
New joint research published today in the journal Nature Communications, led by the Data Science Laboratory in EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences, together with collaborators from Microsoft Research and the University of Fribourg, shows us just what we were doing during COVID-19’s first wave when we were confined in our houses – dreaming about, and likely eating, high calorie comfort food.
As diets were suspected to have become less balanced during the first COVID-19 lockdowns, with potentially important ramifications for public health, the researchers leveraged passively collected large-scale digital trace data to analyze changes in food-related interests across eighteen countries.
Specifically, they captured the popularity of Google search queries related to almost 1500 foods (e.g., bread, pizza, pies) as well as ways of accessing food (e.g., restaurant, recipe) obtained in an aggregated form via the Google Trends tool, to analyze changes in food-related interests.
We saw that as our mobility was drastically reduced and we started to spend more time at home, there was an overall surge in interest in food and we could see that this surge was more drastic and lasted longer than, for example, what usually happens around Christmas and Thanksgiving. We also found that these increases were most drastic for carbohydrate-based foods like pastries, pies, regular breads and banana bread – the king of the pandemic