Using Restaurant POI Data to Explore Regional Structure of Food Culture Based on Cuisine Preference

Shangjing Jiang,Haoran Wang,Haiping Zhang,Guoan Tang,Lei Zhou

doi:10.3390/ijgi10010038

Abstract

As a result of the influence of geographical environment and historical heritage, food preference has significant regional differentiation characteristics. However, the spatial structure of food culture represented by the cuisine culture at the regional level has not yet been explored from the perspective of geography. Cultural regionalization is an important way to analyze and understand the spatial structure of food culture. It is of great significance to deeply mine intra-regional homogeneity and scientifically cognize inter-regional cultural characteristics. This study aims to explore such patterns by focusing on the restaurants of the eight most famous cuisines in Mainland China. Initially, the density based geospatial hotspot detector method is proposed to analyze and mapping the spatial quantitative characteristics of the eight major cuisines. A heuristic method for geographical regionalization based on machine learning was used to analyze spatial distribution patterns in accordance with the proportion of these cuisines in each prefecture-level city. Results show that some types of single-category cuisines have a stronger spatial concentration effect in the present, whereas others have a strong diffusion trend. In the comprehensive analysis of multicategory cuisines, the eight major cuisines formed a new structure of geographical regionalization of Chinese cuisine culture. This study is helpful to understand regional structure characteristics of food preference, and the density-based hotspot detector proposed in this paper can also be used in the analysis of other type of point of interest (POI) data.

Highlights

Diet is a basic material element to meet human physiological needs, but it is an important carrier of human cultural elements
Research topic includes two aspects, namely, what influences regional food cultures and what regional food cultures have influence on. The former focuses on how economy, politics, history, religion, and geographical environment affect regional food culture, whereas the latter focuses on the impact of regional food culture on people’s health, tourism, and other aspects, namely, impact of regional food cultures on the formation of sense of place and the construction of local cultural brands and symbols
The study of food cultures from the perspective of geography emphasizes the human– environment relationship and the law of regional differentiation reflected by food cultures

Summary

Introduction

Diet is a basic material element to meet human physiological needs, but it is an important carrier of human cultural elements. The regional structural characteristics presented by the food culture regionalization provide references for studying human– environment relationship in the geography of food culture [7]. In the research on the relationship between regional food culture and politics, Tellstrom et al studied how governments interpret and present their national image by shaping local food culture [11]; that is, how the differences in political culture affect the food culture and daily food consumption patterns of people in different regions [12,13]. The relationship between religions and regional food culture is a hot topic; for example, religious beliefs affect structures of food cultures, and the degree of attention to the green food differs between religious and nonreligious people [15,16,17]

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Conclusion