The World Connected by Food

Think of the world as a social network. The number of food shared between countries has a lot to say about their ties, just as how people with lots of common friends are likely to become friends themselves.

Thanks to the dataset published on Kaggle, I get to explore this network and show some interesting connections. It’s worth noting that France leads the entry count by huge margin, followed by mostly other western countries. This is perhaps due to the crowdsourced nature of the dataset. Therefore in the charts you will find some traditionally considered culinary powerhouses missing.

This chart shows the percentage of shared food between two countries on the x-axis and y-axis. And it is y-axis centered. For example, in the row that shows New Zealand you will notice two darker colored boxes corresponding to Australia and Czech Republic on the x-axis. It means that of all the New Zealand foods shared with other countries, a lot of them are shared with Australia and Czech Republic. The actual percentage can be read from the color bar.

I also made another graph with the same information including more countries. Also as an UI consideration this is an interactive plot that will show you the pair of countries when your mouse hovers on the boxes. Here is a static version as Medium doesn’t allow javascript embedding but the interactive version can be found here.

Code is here on Github.