This isn’t about Food. It’s about a question such as “During which decade black pepper was the most popular?”

Perhaps you can find more use cases for it? I can’t think of

This is a funny argument because I can certainly imagine myself giving baseball statistics as a prime example of huge effort going into collecting “useless” data! (Unless you manage a baseball team.) I don’t see how your question is less interesting than “who had the 43rd highest batting average in 1934?”, which I’m sure there are multiple places to look up.