WHAT is soppressata? Google searches for the Italian meat surged last week, thanks to a column by David Brooks in the New York Times in which he recounted an awkward lunch at an upscale delicatessen with “a friend with only a high-school degree”. Upon suspecting that his less-credentialed companion might have felt alienated by a menu which listed ingredients such as “soppressata, capicollo and...striata baguette[s]”, Mr Brooks and his colleague then retreated to a Mexican restaurant, which he surmised would constitute a class-neutral haven.

Mr Brooks used this anecdote to highlight a broader argument: that cultural social barriers, such as differences in what people eat, contribute just as much to inequality as economic trends and government policies do. Snarky commenters on social media—many of them the sort of educated coastal liberals who might frequent gourmet sandwich shops—promptly tore into Mr Brooks, both for his theory and his anecdote. But whereas proving that there is a causal link between social mobility and salami savvy is difficult, it appears that Mr Brooks’ general observation that Americans’ culinary preferences vary by social class rings true.

To test this hypothesis, we asked YouGov, a pollster, to survey 1,500 American adults about how often they dine out, how often they eat sushi and how often they eat four particular ethnic foods: French, Mexican, Italian and Indian. Some cuisines did seem to be strong markers of educational attainment. For example, 57% of respondents with postgraduate degrees have eaten sushi within the past year, compared with just 26% of those who never attended college.

Similarly, despite the mockery that Mr Brooks’s tale sparked online, his intuitions turned out to be spot-on. For fear that soppressata itself would be too obscure to ask about in a medium-sized survey, we substituted the better-known term, prosciutto. Indeed, 25% of those with high-school degrees or less had never heard of the cured ham, compared with 11% of postgraduates. The data also support his assumption that Mexican food was likely to span the country’s class chasm: less-educated Americans were nearly as likely as college graduates were to have tucked into a taco.