Blogger Ethan Zuckerman runs through his various strategies for finding which team to support in the World Cup. While he mentions the consideration of a team that your home nation can beat, or one that plays beautiful football and is therefore pleasing to the eye, ultimately, he relies on minor prejudices when forming his decision.

After running through a few of these, he mentions a preference for, “Places I’ve been to over those I’ve never visited, with quality of national cuisine as a tiebreaker.”

Your national team isn't playing all the time, so it pays to come up with some back-up options. No support strategy is more arbitrary than following the team of the nation of your birth: it's a stroke of luck rather than logic, so why not use food preference as a decider? It’s almost as absurd as nationality, because you tend to pick up a preference for another country’s cuisine even if you’ve never been there. “Quality of national cuisine” is hugely subjective, so I thought I'd come up with some more objective measures to pick teams.

Here is my criteria for who I’ll be following/to follow in the initial stages of the World Cup based entirely on my irrational food whims. I briefly went down the route of looking for food data to support my whims, but the Big Mac Index didn’t align with anything to do with football. I’m backing teams based on:

• Perceived popularity and distinctiveness of barbecue in that nation. This makes Group A more complex with Uruguay’s asado; Mexico’s carne asada and South Africa’s braai.
• Number of cookbooks that I own, from or about this nation. This places developing nations at a huge disadvantage and place a large bias towards English speaking countries. At least, this is a quantitive measure.
• Number of national breweries that I can name. I unashamedly like beer.
• Number of restaurants that I’ve eaten at from that nation’s cuisine, this year.

This leaves me supporting Mexico (just over France) in Group A, South Korea in Group B, USA in C, Australia in D, Japan in E, Italy in F, Portugal in G and Spain in Group H.

Other food-related World Cup projects worth watching are Teju Cole and Siddhartha Mitter’s “Not a Safari”. As Teju did  for the 2006 World Cup, their  plan is to watch the games in a bar or restaurant in New York aligned with one of the competing sides and report on proceedings.