changing american diets

After seeing the Open Data Institute’s project on the changing British Diet, I couldn’t help but wonder how the American diet has changed over the years.

The United States Department of Agriculture keeps track of these sort of things through the Food Availability Data System. The program estimates both how much food is produced and how much food people eat, dating back to 1970 through 2013. The data covers the major food categories, such as meat, fruits, and vegetables, across many food items on a per capita and daily basis.

In the interactive below, we look at the major food items in each category. Each column is a category, and each chart is a time series for a major food item, represented as serving units per category. Items move up and down based on their ranking in each group during a given year.

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MOFAD

The Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) is creating the world's first large-scale food museum with exhibits you can eat.

MOFAD will be a global leader in food education, featuring innovative exhibits and programs that show how exciting it is to learn and care about the culture, history, science, production, and commerce of food and drink. Imagine a place where you can use an Aztec kitchen, see cereal made before your eyes, decode food marketing, taste West African street food, make Chinese hand-pulled noodles, learn about agriculture and composting, and see how the body digests a sandwich—all in one museum.

In 2013, MOFAD debuted its first explosive mobile exhibition, BOOM! The Puffing Gun and the Rise of Cereal. The exhibition, which featured a 3,200-pound breakfast cereal puffing machine, drew accolades from media outlets such as The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.

MOFAD Lab, the organization's first brick-and-mortar home, will open in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn on October 28, 2015. In this space, MOFAD will design and showcase its exhibit concepts as it works toward opening the full museum in New York City by 2019. Join the MOFAD mailing list to stay updated on upcoming exhibitions and programs

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Most popular crop per state

"What crop generates the most money in each state? The Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistical Service produces reams of data on such matters, so I figured the question would be easy to answer. But it turned out to be trickier than I thought, because when I pulled the data, I realized that in most states, the biggest crop was one that was used mostly for animal feed. For well over half the states, field corn, soybeans or hay was the crop that generated the most cash in 2012, the latest year for which data are available. Though a small share of some of these crops does eventually get eaten by humans, in the form of things like soy lecithin and high-fructose corn syrup, most of it is fed to animals raised for meat or dairy."

"To get more meaningful results, I decided to strip away those crops that are used largely for animal feed, and focus on crops that people actually eat. I plotted the results on a map, which revealed some surprising trends:"

LINK

Food Webs

"Dr. Samuel Johnson, from Warwick’s Mathematics Institute, explains: “Buildings require structural supports, such as the metal or timber frames around which they are then built. For the building to remain standing, though, these supports need to comply with the laws of mathematics and physics; if the roof is too heavy for the frame, the building collapses. The frames also need flexibility to adapt to conditions, if they are too rigid they become fragile and, for instance, unable to cope with difficult weather.

“The same is true of natural ecosystems; they need support and structure. Trophic Coherence seems to play a similar role in ecosystems as supporting frames of buildings — it is a structural property that helps ecosystems survive, and is common to all the ones we have analyzed. It provides them with essential support and structure.”"

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Visual Complexity

Food Hacks

I was familiar with "design hacks" more in terms of IKEA products than architecture or food. But, this act of 'hacking' - or taking something with an intended purpose or function and using it in an uncoventional way to recieve an intended, personal outcome - has been thrown around more and more. It's incredibly creative and can have an impact of personalization, customization, and optimization by getting more or better out of something that you already have. 

Design does this. We could learn a lot about architecture and design from hacks. Where are architecture hacks in our everyday world?

Here are some pretty cleaver food hacks.

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Austin Food Deserts

Research involving data collection and visuallizing that information from UTSOA

LINK

urban informatics

"The N.Y.U. researchers see an opportunity to take a quantitative, comprehensive look at a community, run experiments, and make discoveries. Dr. Kontokosta observed that the concept of “sustainability” has been narrowly defined, mostly focused on water and energy consumption so far. “Sustainability has really been a measurement problem,”he said.

But with a broader array of measurements in a community, he said, a far wider range of observations becomes possible. An example, Dr. Kontokosta said, might be measuring noise, air quality or social interactions, and seeing how those correlate with educational achievement.

Combining measurements of the environment, physical systems and human behavior, said Steven E. Koonin, director of the N.Y.U. center, will open the door to understanding and modeling communities in new ways. “The real gold will be in combining the data science and the social sciences,” Dr. Koonin said.

One result, he said, will be to change traditional disciplines. Civil engineering, he said, has traditionally centered on physical systems rather than human behavior. In the future, Dr. Koonin said, there may be careers in “human-centered civil engineering” or “civic engineering.” Architects and interior designers, he said, study how people interact with buildings and rooms, but without much quantitative information. “Quantitative design,” he said, may be a career of the future."

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Inforgraphic - Food Waste

new infographic for DebtAdvisoryCentre.co.uk that explores the true cost of food waste