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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...Shift in How People Eat

...Consumers are walking away from America’s most iconic food brands. Big food manufacturers are reacting by cleaning up their ingredient labels, acquiring healthier brands and coming out with a prodigious array of new products. Last year, General Mills purchased the organic pasta maker Annie’s Homegrown for $820 million — a price that was over four times the company’s revenues, likening it to valuations more often seen in Silicon Valley. The company also introduced more than 200 new products, ranging from Cheerios Protein to Betty Crocker gluten-free cookie mix, to capitalize on the latest consumer fads...

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How packaging can make food more flavorful.

Sitting in a pub one night a dozen years ago, Charles Spence realized that he was in the presence of the ideal experimental model: the Pringles potato chip. Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, runs the Crossmodal Research Lab there, which studies how the brain integrates information from the five human senses to produce a coherent impression of reality. Very often, these modes of perception influence one another on the way to becoming conscious thought. For instance, scientists have long known that whether a strawberry tastes sweet or bland depends in no small part on the kinds of organic molecule detected by olfactory receptors in the nose. Spence had been wondering whether taste might be similarly shaped by sound: Would a potato chip taste different if the sound of its crunch was altered? To explore that question, he needed a chip with a reliably uniform crunch. The Pringle—that thin, homogeneous, stackable paraboloid—was perfect.

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Food Hacking

Food Hacking: Virtual Cookie
HOSTED BY SIMON KLOSE
October 6, 2015 / 10:00 am

Host Simon Klose kicks off our new series on tech cuisine with a Japanese researcher who shows us how to use virtual reality to make a cookie taste like five different things. We also take a bite of some of Tokyo’s best video game cuisine at Capcom Café. Enjoy!

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Taste of Chicago

By the time of the 1893 World's Fair, downtown Chicago was expanding rapidly with major hotels and a large retail shopping district, metal frame office towers, buildings to house the arts, and cable cars and elevated trains. On this one and a half hour walking tour, you will learn how Chicago developed into a world class city. You will see historic buildings from 1893, and learn about the business leaders and architects who "built" Chicago. You will also get to taste food that first made its appearance at the world's fair and is still popular today. Did you know that all beef hot dogs started in Chicago in 1893? Or that sweet treats like Cracker Jack, brownies, and Wrigley Spearmint and Juicy Fruit gum began here? Join us on this fun "see and taste" walking tour. 

This tour includes a full-sized hot dog, caramel corn, and brownie that can be eaten along the way or taken home with you. Beverages are not included, but you may bring your own on the tour. Please note that open beverage containers may not be allowed on all tour stops.
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Taste + Space

Lidia Klein

"Among the senses engaged in experiencing architecture, taste remains the least active. Edible architectural structures seem only to exist in fiction, in stories such as The Gingerbread House, a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812. The protagonists, Hansel and Gretel, are a young brother and sister cast away from home. Wandering alone through the forest, the two children discover a house made of cake and confectionery. Tempted by the luscious structure, the hungry siblings start to bite into its sugar windowpanes and gingerbread roof, not yet knowing this architectural treat is a trap set by a witch. In Grimms’ story, architecture appears as an object of immediate, bodily experience. Doors, roof, walls and other structural elements function as sources of sensual pleasure, as they are “nibbled,” “tasted,” and “enjoyed with.”1 The tale of Hansel and Gretel is still one of the most powerful stories on the sensual perception of architecture, yet it remains different from our experience of buildings. First, the gingerbread house lacks the constraints of “real” architecture, which is expected to provide shelter and possess the quality of permanence. Second, its sensuous dimension remains in strong contrast with the dominant discourse of architecture."

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