Which HUDS chicken dish is most loved?

An Investigation by Laura Chapman

Red spice chicken is perhaps the most notorious HUDS (Harvard University Dining Services) entree. But do students actually like it more than other chicken dishes? I decided to see how red spice chicken stacked up against its poultry peers.

I made a Google form asking students to rank their preferences among all the HUDS chicken dishes I could think of. The form started with 8 chicken dishes and expanded to 13 after people commented on the form about chicken dishes that were missing from the survey. Participants were not required to rank every single dish.

The form was sent out over several house email lists and posted on the Harvard meme page. In a couple days there were over 130 responses.

The first visualization shows the number of votes for each chicken dish grouped by ranking. Use the drop-down menu to show just the top 7 (determined by the number of first choice votes).

Chicken parmesan was the most popular first choice, followed by brunch broccoli chicken stuffed and popcorn chicken. Chicken parm and popcorn chicken have large numbers of votes in the first few rankings, indicating their broad popularity among students. Brunch broccoli chicken has many first-choice votes but few second- or third-choice votes, indicating that it is more of a cult favorite. Red spice chicken was only the fourth most popular first choice- around 16% of respondents named it as their favorite HUDS chicken dish.
However, simply considering the winner to be the most popular first choice ignores the rest of the ranked votes in places 2-13. I applied a number of different ranked choice vote-counting algorithms to the chicken data to see some potentially more representative results.

Since some chicken dishes were added to the survey partway through and respondents were not required to rank all dishes, some chicken dishes received more votes overall. I adjusted for this fact by including normalized versions of the Borda and Dowdall methods, in which the result for each dish is divided by the number of votes for that dish to create a sort of "average points per vote" score that is independent of the number of total votes received.

Chicken parmesan outperforms all other chicken dishes in every vote-counting method, in addition to receiving the most first-choice votes. Popcorn chicken and chicken tendies are second and third in most cases. Brunch broccoli chicken sneaks into second place in the Dowdall normalized count, since Dowdall gives greater advantage to dishes with more first-choice votes than the other methods.
Chicken parmesan was the winner no matter the vote-counting method. Chicken parm is my personal favorite so I was happy to see this.

Out of the others, I'd say the rest of the top tier is chicken tendies and popcorn chicken, and the middle tier is generally brunch broccoli chicken, chicken nuggets, General Tso's chicken, and red spice chicken, with the rest in the bottom tier.

The three top chickens- chicken parm, tendies, and popcorn chicken- are basically the same preparation of chicken (breaded and fried) but in different sizes (chicken parm being the largest). Interestingly, nuggets were less popular overall than either the smaller popcorn chicken or the larger tendies. General Tso's chicken is just nuggets in a sauce so it makes sense that it performed similarly. It can be concluded that chicken must be breaded and fried to produce a competitive dish, but breading and frying is by no means a guarantee for victory- look at the mediocre performance of fried buttermilk chicken. And breading alone is not enough- red spice chicken and broccoli stuffed chicken were not as popular as their fried competitors.
In addition to the rankings, the survey also had an open-ended, optional comments section. About a third of respondents chose to leave a comment. Here are some of their thoughts:

  • bruh this was hard
  • butter chicken >>>>>>>>>
  • BUTTER CHICKEN FTW!! (Also, this survey is amazing - I don't know you, but thanks for doing this!!)"
  • chicken tendies with hot sauce are incomprehensibly good, but i'd still die by chicken parmesan
  • do you have pictures? I can't believe it but I actually miss HUDS
  • Easy money buttermilk chicken for LIFE gotta get that GREEZE
  • Grilled chicken is the only reasonable answer
  • I expect a detailed report to be published at the end of this survey
  • i hate red spice chicken so much
  • I have a list of 28+ Different HUDS chicken dishes that I’ve been tracking over time and I am SO GRATEFUL someone made a survey for this at last
  • I love chicken
  • I think a good chicken parm beats a good chicken tender, but an average chicken tender beats an average chicken parm
  • I would do anything for huds chicken tendies right now
  • im vegetarian
  • Mmmm how much would I pay to eat that brunch broccoli chicken once again😭😭😭😭😭
  • popcorn chicken!
  • Red spice chicken!!!!!!!!
  • RED SPICY 4 LYFE
  • tbh i loved the chicken tikka masala and i think it should be on here
  • Tendies supreme
  • thank you for doing this very important work
  • the brunch chicken stuffed w broccoli is in my dreams every night i miss it so much
  • what abt the fried buttermilk chicken? that shit slapsss
  • why was this so hard to do
  • wow I never realized there were so many chickens :o
  • brunch chicken stuffed with broccoli is truly the woat.
According to this survey of about 130 Harvard students, red spice chicken is by no measure the favorite HUDS chicken dish. The favorite chicken dish seems to be chicken parm, with other highly-ranked dishes including tendies, popcorn chicken, General Tso's chicken and brunch broccoli chicken, though others were also competitive depending on the scoring criteria.

So now we know! I'm not sure how relevant this information is now, given that most Harvard students won't be at school in the fall. I have already graduated so I probably will never eat any of these dishes again. But one day, Harvard will open back up safely and fully, and when they do, I hope they serve more chicken parm than they did when I was there.

I'd like to thank everyone who filled out the survey, permitting me to indulge in this random pet project, and I hope you enjoyed learning about ranked-choice voting and HUDS chicken dishes as much as I did. If you are a Harvard undergrad and you haven't filled out the survey, you still can! If a lot more people fill it out, I'll update the data here.
Links to code and data