Abstract
Food is a central element of humans’ life, and food preferences are amongst others manifestations of social, cultural and economic forces that influence the way we view, prepare and consume food. Historically, data for studies of food preferences stems from consumer panels which continuously capture food consumption and preference patterns from individuals and households. In this work we look at a new source of data, i.e., server log data from a large recipe platform on the World Wide Web, and explore its usefulness for understanding online food preferences. The main findings of this work are: (i) recipe preferences are partly driven by ingredients, (ii) recipe preference distributions exhibit more regional differences than ingredient preference distributions, and (iii) weekday preferences are clearly distinct from weekend preferences.
Highlights
Italians are ?Macaronis”, the English are ?Roastbeef ”, the French are ?Frogs” and the Germans are ?Krauts” [ ]
Our work thereby shows that recipe visits as well as the inferred ingredient visits represent a preliminary, yet promising, signal for food preferences of human populations, since (a) our observations can in part be linked to real-world events, such as the asparagus season, and findings from offline studies and (b) our observations are fairly consistent on a macro and meso level which suggests that the observed online preference distributions can be reproduced at different scales
For users? recipe preferences we can see that they are relatively stable during the week, but major shifts in the preferences happen during the weekends. This confirms our hypothesis that users? online food preferences change during the weekend which becomes visible in their recipe selection process which is in part driven by ingredient preferences as we have shown before
Summary
Italians are ?Macaronis”, the English are ?Roastbeef ”, the French are ?Frogs” and the Germans are ?Krauts” [ ]. Work by Manuel Calvo [ ] observed that in situations of migration, certain features of cuisine are sometimes retained even when the original culture and language have already been forgotten. This suggests that culture and diet are deeply connected. Understanding dietary patterns and food preferencesa of humans is central to several research communities. It is relevant from an anthropological and sociological view point, and from a medical point of view since food preferences and diet obviously impact health
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