Dear Google: Your food map of the U.S. is ... puzzling

What is up with Google's holiday "doodle," the little gadget that shows up when you open a Google search bar?

Tuesday's gadget is supposed to be a cookbook that opens to a map of the United States with a food for each state. Clicking on the states, though, turns up a strange menu.

North Carolina's dish? Snow ice cream, for a state that gets only 5 inches of snow a year.

South Carolina's dish is chicken bog, a chicken stew that's much more common in North Carolina. South Carolina's most famous stew is usually Frogmore.

Other states get even odder. Missouri's is hamburgers, with a note to add peanut butter. Mississippi's is taco soup. Ohio gets flour-based sausage gravy, a breakfast delicacy that's more closely associated with the South.

Kansas gets Swedish meatballs, and while Iowa also gets hamburgers, it comes with a claim that they are "loose meat sandwiches." Loose meat sandwiches, common in the Midwest, may be served on hamburger buns, but they're much closer to sloppy Joes, not something you can put on the grill.

Idaho's dish is crepes, and Oregon's "dish" is teriyaki sauce.

Further digging turns up a reason for this food-fusion confusion: The dishes aren't the dishes associated with each state. The search service picked dishes based on what people in those states searched for.

That explains North Carolina's, anyway: Snow is so rare here that when it happens, we have to look up the recipe. (It's nice to know that people in Ohio love Southern-style sausage gravy so much.)

Once again, if you really want confusion, just ask a computer.

This story was originally published July 3, 2018 at 1:34 PM.