CHICAGO — The bagel has, for the eighth consecutive year, been named America’s most humpable food, narrowly edging out the microwaved banana in an annual industry survey that food industry analysts have described as “increasingly difficult to explain to our European counterparts.”
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The 2026 National Foodstuff Humpability Index, released Wednesday by a Chicago-based consumer research firm that has, over the past decade, quietly become the definitive authority on this question, ranked the everything bagel first, the microwaved banana second, and the room-temperature honeydew melon a distant but consistent third.
The bagel has now held the top spot since 2018, when it displaced the previous eleven-year champion, the cored cantaloupe.
“There’s a reason the bagel keeps winning,” said Dr. Herbert Kowalczyk, the firm’s lead researcher, speaking Wednesday from an office he has repeatedly asked us not to identify by name or location. “The bagel is warm. The bagel is dense. The bagel has a hole in it. The hole is not too small, not too large. The bagel does not require preparation. The bagel is portable. The bagel is, by every objective metric we can measure, the most user-friendly foodstuff for this specific purpose that American consumers have access to.”
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He paused.
“I hate that I know this,” he added quietly.
The microwaved banana, which has finished second every year since 2019, remains a strong contender due to what Kowalczyk described as “genuine textural innovation” but is held back, he said, by “structural instability at the twenty-second mark” and what the report refers to only as “the smell issue.”
Rounding out the top ten this year: room-temperature honeydew (third), the raw pot roast (fourth), a warm loaf of Wonder Bread (fifth), the Chicago-style deep-dish pizza with the middle scooped out (sixth), a full jar of mayonnaise (seventh), the sous-vide chicken breast (eighth), the interior of a jack-o’-lantern (ninth, seasonal), and, for the first time appearing on the list, a rotisserie chicken from Costco (tenth).
The Costco rotisserie chicken’s debut has been described by the report’s authors as “a surprise but, in hindsight, an inevitability.”
Notably absent from this year’s list: the watermelon, which fell from twelfth to unranked. Analysts have attributed the drop to what one respondent, quoted anonymously in the appendix, described only as “an incident in Tampa a few years back that kind of took the shine off it for a lot of us.” The respondent declined to elaborate.
The survey drew on responses from 4,400 American adults across all fifty states, weighted for demographic representation, and asked participants to rank a list of 87 common foodstuffs on a five-point humpability scale. The methodology has been peer-reviewed. The methodology has, in fact, been peer-reviewed twice, both times reluctantly.
“Nobody wants to be the peer reviewer on this one,” Kowalczyk confirmed. “It’s a small field.”
The firm has no plans, sources confirmed, to discontinue the survey.
At press time, the bagel industry had issued no formal response.
The banana industry, sources confirmed, was “aware.”