View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Queen Mary Research Online Kissing Cuisines: Exploring Worldwide Culinary Habits on the Web Sajadmanesh, S; Jafarzadeh, S; Ossia, SA; Rabiee, HR; Haddadi, H; Mejova, Y; Musolesi, M; Cristofaro, ED; Stringhini, G https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08469 For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/17687 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] Kissing Cuisines: Exploring Worldwide Culinary Habits on the Web Sina Sajadmaneshy, Sina Jafarzadehy, Seyed Ali Ossiay, Hamid R. Rabieey, Hamed Haddadiz, Yelena Mejova?, Mirco Musolesi], Emiliano De Cristofaro], Gianluca Stringhini] ySharif University of Technology zQueen Mary University of London ?Qatar Computing Research Institute ]UCL ABSTRACT this motivation in mind, in this paper, we set to investigate the way As food becomes an important part of modern life, recipes shared in which ingredients relate to different cuisines and recipes, as well on the web are a great indicator of civilizations and culinary at- as the geographic and health significances thereof. We use a few titudes in different countries. Similarly, ingredients, flavors, and datasets, including 157K recipes from over 200 cuisines crawled nutrition information are strong signals of the taste preferences of from Yummly, BBC Food data, and country health statistics. individuals from various parts of the world. Yet, we do not have a Overview & Contributions. First, we characterize different thorough understanding of these palate varieties. cuisines around the world by their ingredients and flavors. Then, In this paper, we present a large-scale study of recipes published we train a Support Vector Machine classifier and use deep learning on the Web and their content, aiming to understand cuisines and models to predict a cuisine from its ingredients. This also enables culinary habits around the world. Using a database of more than us to discover the similarity across different cuisines based on their 157K recipes from over 200 different cuisines, we analyze ingredi- ingredients – e.g., Chinese and Japanese – while, intuitively, they ents, flavors, and nutritional values which distinguish dishes from might be considered different. We look at the diversity of ingredi- different regions, and use this knowledge to assess the predictabil- ents in recipes from different countries and compare them to geo- ity of recipes from different cuisines. We then use country health graphic and human migration statistics. We also measure the rela- statistics to understand the relation between these factors and health tionship between the nutrition value of the recipes vis-à-vis public indicators of different nations, such as obesity, diabetes, migration, health statistics such as obesity and diabetes. and health expenditure. Our results confirm the strong effects of Paper Organization. The rest of the paper is organized as fol- geographical and cultural similarities on recipes, health indicators, lows. In Section 2, we present the datasets used in our evaluation, and culinary preferences between countries around the world. then Section 3 presents an analysis of the diversity of the ingredi- ents around the world, looking at geographic diversity patterns of 1. INTRODUCTION cuisines and notable ingredients in particular ones. In Section 4, we look at the similarity between the cuisines based on their ingre- Nowadays, the importance of food and eating goes far beyond a dients and flavors, and use these results to train machine-learning means to survive. Often regarded as a social construct, food has be- classifiers for ingredient-based cuisine prediction models in Sec- come an essential part of modern day life. New jargon has entered tion 5. In Section 6, we correlate the nutrition values of recipes for our vocabulary as expressions like “foodie”, “food porn”, or “food different countries with their public health statistics. After review- tourism”, hint at the buzz around the entertainment arising from ing related work in Section 7, the paper concludes in Section 8. our culinary experiences. With the rise of social media, and the proliferation of always-on always-connected devices, this gobbling revolution is not confined to our kitchens, restaurants, and food 2. DATASETS stalls, but naturally breaks out on the social web. Sharing pictures Our study relies on a number of datasets, namely, a large set of one’s food has become a growing passion for both tourists and of recipes collected from Yummly, a list of ingredients compiled locals [16], and dedicated food searching and sharing apps, along by BBC Food, and country health statistics. In this section, we with recipe websites and the ubiquitous social presence of celebrity describe these datasets in detail. chefs, have all contributed to a thriving culture and passion around food worldwide. 2.1 Yummly data arXiv:1610.08469v1 [cs.CY] 26 Oct 2016 Around the world, different cuisines are naturally intertwined Yummly is a website offering recipe recommendations based on with cultures, traditions, passions, and religion of individuals liv- the user’s taste.1 It allows users to search for recipes, learning ing in different countries and continents. Sushi, curry, kebab, pasta, which dishes the user likes and providing them with recipe sugges- tacos – these are just examples of foods conventionally associated tions. It also provides a user-friendly API, which we use to collect with specific countries, as are specific cuisines and ingredients. recipes. First, we crawled Wikipedia for a list of cuisines2, then, in Different dietary habits around the world are also closely related Summer 2016, we queried the Yummly API for recipes belonging to various health statistics, including cancer incidence [3], death to each cuisine. In the end, we obtained 157,013 recipes belonging rates [13], cardiovascular complications [18], and obesity [14]. to over 200 different cuisines. Due to API restrictions, we limited Although there are many common beliefs about cuisines, the number of recipes per to 5,000. recipes, and their ingredients, it is still unclear what types of ingre- Each recipe obtained from the Yummly API contains a number dients are unique in/about different countries, what factors make of attributes. In our study, we use the following: cuisines similar to each other (e.g., in terms of ingredients or fla- 1http://www.yummly.com vors), and how these factors are related to individuals’ health. With 2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cuisines 1 1. Ingredients: Each recipe contains a list of the ingredients we will use the diabetes prevalence estimates from World Devel- that are required to prepare it. Since Yummly acts as a recipe opment Indicators by The World Bank4, the health expenditure as aggregator from various cooking sites, the ingredients do not a percentage of total GDP from The World Bank5, and the obesity always appear with the same wording. In fact, it is very prevalence from the World Health Organization6 in the countries common to see the same ingredient written with different to which the cuisines are mapped, using the most recent available spellings or by using a different terminology. We overcome data, which is from 2014. these issues through a standardization process described in Section 2.2. 3. INGREDIENTS AROUND THE WORLD 2. Flavors: Recipes are identified by six flavors, specifically, In this section, we provide a characterization of the ingredients saltiness, sourness, sweetness, bitterness, savoriness, and used in dishes from all over the world. First, we investigate the spiciness. These scores are on a range of 0 to 1. diversity of ingredients in different countries. Next, we define the 3. Rating: Users are encouraged to provide a rating, from 1 to concept of “complexity” of a dish in terms of its ingredients and 5, for the recipes that they try. From the Yummly API, we look at how complexity changes around the world. Finally, we dis- retrieve the average review rating for each recipe. cuss a series of case studies of most notable and significant ingre- dients in some eminent cuisines. 4. Nutrition: Unfortunately, the Yummly search API does not directly provide nutritional information for the recipes. As a 3.1 Diversity of ingredients consequence, we designed a simple web crawler to fetch the Aiming to investigate the diversity of ingredients in dishes of a corresponding web page for each recipe in our dataset, and cuisine, we set to answer the following questions: extract information on the amount of protein, fat, saturated fat, sodium, fiber, sugar, and carbohydrate of a recipe (per 1. How many different unique ingredients are used in total in serving), as well as calories. dishes of each country? In other words, what is the number of unique ingredients the people of a country have ever used Although some ingredients appear in other languages (e.g., Ger- to prepare a culinary dish? The answer to this question is man, French, etc), the recipes presented here are mostly in English; what we refer to as the global diversity. hence it is possible that some more authentic or niche local recipes might be missing from our dataset. However, considering the num- 2. How different are the dishes of an individual country relative ber of recipes and a large cut-off threshold introduced later on, we together in terms of their ingredients combination? In other are confident this does not significantly affect our analysis. More- words, do different dishes usually share some ingredients or over, authors of the recipes might not represent the entire popula- their ingredients are almost different? The answer to this tion, given the fact that they are likely to be tech-savvy. This might question is what we call local diversity.