Global flavor map

[larryroohr]

Thought others here might enjoy this too. Love the charts.

http://www.nature.com/srep/2011/111215/srep00196/fig_tab/srep00196_F1.html

NPR story:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/12/21/144021294/what-a-global-flavor-map-can-tell-us-about-how-we-pair-foods

Larry

[FrogPrincesse]

Thanks for bringing this up to our attention, this is interesting.

My first thought is that the number of recipes they use for their evaluations of cuisines that are not North American seems quite limited. See page 7 in this document- more than 40 000 recipes for North America but only a few thousands for the other four cuisines evaluated. For example, with about 2000 recipes for "Western European" cuisine, that would mean about 10 cookbooks (assuming 200 recipes per cookbook). But their definition of Western European cuisine includes 9 countries so that's only about 1 book per country. So you have to wonder how accurate these conclusions are. I though that it was a little odd to see vanilla as a main ingredient in Western European cuisine, for example.

It would be interesting to see if the same conclusions still hold with a more complete online database such as EatYourBooks, for example.

Edited December 22, 2011 by FrogPrincesse (log)