A pair of researchers at the University of Aberdeen in the U.K. has found that people across cultures have a desire for delivery food at two particular times: 7 p.m. and 2 a.m. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Nicolas Alvarado and Tyler Stevenson describe their study of Google searches as it relates to food delivery requests by people living in various countries and what they found.

To learn more about social behavior, the researchers ran software that allowed them to analyze data from Google searches. In their case, they were looking for patterns regarding when people search on Google for places that deliver food (presumably so they could order it). They looked at data from the U.S., India, Canada, the U.K. and Australia regarding searches containing keywords for a common local food delivery item, such as pizza in the U.S. The data they studied came from daily searches that were conducted in 2016 and 2017 during two-week periods in March and September. They also pulled more generalized data regarding food-specific items for the period 2011 to 2016 to gain a better understanding of the right keywords to use.

The researchers report that while food searches were made consistently during most times of the day, two particular times stood out—7 p.m. and 2 a.m. During those two time periods, searches for delivery food places spiked. They report further that these two times were consistent across countries, and they stood out in both time periods tested. They suggest this pattern could be tied to our early ancestry—back when humans were still hunting or foraging for food, they tended to do so during particular times of the day. They further suggest that the trends they found on the internet could be a modern form of foraging. They note that such habits of old, when carried out in modern ways, could explain why humans tend to overeat, quite often to the point of obesity. They note that people of all cultures adhere to circadian rhythms and that foraging may be a part of that. They also note that the two different spikes might be attributable to two well-known chronotypes—morning people and night people.

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