For years I’ve held that pretty much all pizza is delicious.

Chicago deep-dish is delicious. Fancy thin crust is delicious. NYC $1 pizza is delicious and NYC $3.50 Joe’s is delicious. Even frozen supermarket Celeste pizza is delicious.

Basically, if what you’re eating is made up of bread, cheese and tomato sauce, it’s probably delicious. It’s a magical ingredient formula in that way.

“So what?” you’re likely asking.

Well, I sometimes find myself having to defend this position when I am with pizza snobs. Or I find myself rolling my eyes when I read a restaurant’s menu that touts the “fame” or superiority of its pies.

Coincidentally, I found some data today to support my belief. This data shows that despite some pizza snobs the overwhelming majority of people basically feel the same way I do: that all pizza is good pizza.

Christian Rudder’s book Dataclysm includes a graph taken from Foursquare data about people’s ratings of NYC pizza places and the graph pretty much speaks for itself. Most ratings for pizza places fall between a 7-10. In other words: if someplace is throwing together some bread, cheese and tomato sauce then people are almost always going to like it and rate it highly. It’s hard to mess up. See graph below.

Rudder’s main topic of data exploration is based on OkCupid data and he uses this graph to illustrate that human preferences don’t always fall into a bell curve like they do when men or women are asked to grade the attractiveness of the opposite sex based solely on headshots.

It’s an interesting book. And interesting that we are only at the beginning of analyzing the huge amount of information we submit online about our preferences every day as we live on our devices and become more and more comfortable with sharing information with machines.