A Visualization of World Cuisines

By jyothi

In a previous post, we had ‘mapped’ the culinary diversity in India through a visualization of food consumption patterns. Since then, one of the topics in my to-do list was a visualization of world cuisines. The primary question was similar to that asked of the Indian cuisine: Are cuisines of geographically and culturally closer regions also similar? I recently came across an article on the analysis of recipe ingredients that distinguish the cuisines of the world. The analysis was conducted on a publicly available dataset consisting of ingredients for more than 13,000 recipes from the recipe website Epicurious. Each recipe was also tagged with the cuisine it belonged to, and there were a total of 26 different cuisines. This dataset was initially reported in an analysis of flavor network and principles of food pairing.

In this post, we (re)look the Epicurious recipe dataset and perform an exploratory analysis and visualization of ingredient frequencies among cuisines. Ingredients that are frequently found in a region’s recipes would also have high consumption in that region, and so an analysis of the ‘ingredient frequency’ of a cuisine should give us similar info as an analysis of ‘ingredient consumption’.

Outline of Analysis Method

Here is a part of the first few lines of data from the Epicurious dataset:

Each row of the dataset lists the ingredients for one recipe and the first column gives the cuisine the recipe belongs to. As the first step in our analysis, we collect ALL the ingredients for each cuisine …read more

Source:: r-bloggers.com