The pizza pie whose slices add up to 274%

Pie chart titled “What America puts on its pizza” with five slices — pepperoni 64%, sausage 56%, mushrooms 54%, extra cheese 52%, onions 48% — drawn as a single complete circle even though the labels sum to 274% — Showing the misleading chart

Horizontal bar chart of the same five toppings on a 0–100% axis, each bar the share of US adults who like that topping, with a note that a select-all question sums to 274%, not 100 — Showing the misleading chart

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YouGov asked Americans which toppings they like — a pick-all-that-apply question. Bake the five most-liked answers into a pie chart, as we have here, and the slices quietly sum to nearly three whole pizzas.

YouGov, “These are the most liked – and disliked – pizza toppings in America” — poll of 6,168 US adults, 3–4 February 2021, 2021Added July 4, 2026

01The claim

Here’s how America’s pizza preference divides up — pepperoni takes the biggest slice, and every topping fits neatly into the whole.

02The trick

A pie chart is a promise that its slices are parts of one whole that sums to 100%. But this was a “select every topping you like” question, so 64% liking pepperoni and 56% liking sausage aren’t competing shares — a single person is counted in both. The five figures add to 274%. To force them into a circle, each slice was resized to its share of that 274, silently remapping “64% of people like pepperoni” into “pepperoni is 23% of the pie” — a number that means nothing and that no respondent ever gave. (The pie is ours: YouGov published these five percentages, not a chart that slices them. Every figure in it is theirs.)

03The fix

On plain bars from 0 to 100%, each topping keeps its real value: 64% like pepperoni, 48% like onions, and the bars are free to sum past 100 because people were allowed to love more than one topping. Add them up and you get 274% — the clear signal that this was never a pie in the first place.