‘World’s Best Foods’, Explained
It’s easy to have a thought, a feeling that perhaps something is some way.
To confirm, you might need more data.
What the data reveals: whether or not people admit it, the lack of diversity is glaring in food media today and historically…Yet representation matters.
2015 - The Jemima Code
In the foreword of the 2015 book, ‘The Jemima Code’ by Toni Tipton Martin, John Egerton shares some facts:
In a 200 year period, from the birth of America as a nation to the end of the twentieth century:
100, 000 recipes collections were printed of which
only 200 +/- were attributed to Black cooks and writers
AND
Before 1900
Only 4 of these were Black cookbooks
published in the North.
One would expect at least some correlation between population and ‘representation’ in published media but that’s not the case.
Cookbook Publishing in America, 1800 - 1999
2017 - Intersectional Analyst
Lorraine Chuen, a Toronto-based writer and co-founder of (no longer active but still highly relevant!) data journalism project, Intersectional Analyst, released "Food, Race, and Power: Who gets to be an authority on 'ethnic' cuisines?" For this report, Chuen analysed the headnotes and bylines of 17, 000 plus recipes in the New York Times' Cooking section archives. Her study interrogates who the authority figures are on non-Western cuisines.
The results?
In almost every cuisine category - Chinese, Vietnamese, ‘African’, Caribbean, over 80+% of recipes are by white writers.
PS: while other cuisines are broken down, Africa isn’t because Africa is a country! Sigh! As is the Caribbean.
When Ozoz reached out in mid-August to discuss a project idea she had that explored content on the internet talking about “food from around the world”, what I would uncover from building and analyzing the dataset was mind shifting. Food is usually an afterthought for me and my relationship with it is mostly functional, but whilst researching on this project, I got to see that it transcends much more, especially as it relates to representation.
2020 - Ozoz & Mercy
One day a few months ago, I began thinking about representation and the different ways exclusion happens. I conducted random Google searches for World’s best foods. I had my suspicions but wanted heart to be accompanied by data just to put to rest any arguments.
The initial idea was to scrape the web and parse the information from articles that either spoke about foods or drinks from around the world in the context of ‘best, favorite, top’. Search terms like “Around the World in Food”, “Traditional food around the world”, “Must-eat dishes around the world”, “Drinks around the world” and “Around the world in breakfast” were used in three of the most popular search engines - Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo - to find articles and provide data for the project. Because of the differences in format and structure of these articles, it was difficult to create a single parser to handle all the content in the given time. The alternative was manual extraction.
Two weeks later, we’d successfully gone through and found on the internet 345 articles to identify 10,000+ mentions of food from around the world from 2003 to 2020. Before digging deep into the data, it was quickly apparent that when the writers of these articles spoke about “foods from around the world”, about 86% of the time, they were referring to countries in Europe - 38.46% of article mentions, Asia - 31.39% of article mentions or North America - 15.82% of article mentions leaving the ‘rest of the world’ with 14% of the mentions.
Another observation was how ‘reputable’ sources like CNN and BBC set the tone for many other articles, creating a compound effect. Foods highlighted by such sources were referenced/ got more mentions. The impact of that compounding is that those countries that suffered from a lack of representation suffered even more, with their mentions steadily decreasing - a snapshot of how easy it is to erase entire groups of people and their cultural identity.
Visualizing the data reminded me of maps I’d seen on TV that highlighted the electricity situation in Africa, poorly lit and badly represented.
Earth from Space, NASA
This is true for most countries on the continent. It was hard to come to terms with the poor representation regarding foods of Africa in all the articles surveyed. One would think the continent was yet to be fully discovered and our foods, well-guarded mysteries.
Looking closely at Africa, 4 countries stood out, Morocco - 158 mentions, South Africa - 123 mentions, Egypt - 79 mentions, and Ethiopia - 55 mentions, a fine example of Food Colorism? So that when finally ‘Africa’ makes it to the table, certain countries - more white passing - were more likely to be mentioned. Moroccan and Egyptian cuisines have strong Mediterranean and are often likened to foods from Greece, Italy, Spain, or France. As Mediterranean cuisine has gotten a lot of attention over the years, its popularity might have rubbed off on these two countries, making them amongst the most popular food locations mentioned in ‘Africa’. With South Africa, its popularity can be attributed to being the country with the largest white population in Africa.
From the yearly distribution of the data, articles consistently mentioned Europe and Asia.
2015 saw the European continent doubling its number of mentions, 2019 had both continents being tied and 2020 had the Asian continent having the most mentions.
A metric - number of mentions per 1 million people - was applied to ‘check representation’. The premise? A positive relationship/ correlation should exist between population and media visibility. Of course, there will be many adjustments to make for publishing capability and capacity, knowledge and literacy levels, historical approaches to knowledge preservation and many more. In the visual below, most of Africa and Asia - unlike Europe and North America - are not well/ sufficiently represented in media.
