Maybe it’s because we haven’t had lunch yet, but today we have got food on the brain. And what happens around VisualCue whenever we can’t stop thinking about it? We scour the Internet for data visualizations.

Turns out there are a ton of visualizations out there about food! And it makes sense: everyone eats, and most of us care about eating well, so we collect data about the food we put into our bodies and visualize that data in interesting ways.

So tuck your napkin under your chin and grab those forks, this week we are looking at some of the most impressive visualizations about food!

What to eat

It’s one of those struggles that most people seem to understand. Standing in front of the produce section at the grocery store and being absolutely stumped about what to get.

What’s better for me? Do I go for the blueberries or the grapes? The tomatoes or the avocado? The jicama or the watermelon?

Our first data visualization, fruitvs.com, has the answer.

This amazing data visualization website has all of the information you need to make an informed decision about which fruits to buy.

But what we love about this visualization in particular is that it isn’t just another visualization about how much sugar is in a serving of blueberries (or any other fruit you can imagine). No, we have the nutrition information on the packaging to tell us that. What this visualization does is allow you to compare two fruits and then color codes the information so that you can easily tell, at a glance, which fruit succeeds in which category. The ability to sort and filter the data then lets you dive deeper and  learn even more.

Now you can finally make a decision about which food to eat based on data on exactly how it is better for you. Now you just need to learn to avoid the candy aisle.

What does data taste like?

We have seen a lot of data visualizations- anyone who has looked around our blog has seen just how many fun data visualizations we can find on any given Friday.

But this one is… different. We love it because it proves, once and for all, that there is no limit to the different kinds of data visualizations you can have.

This website showcases data visualizations you can actually eat.

data-cuisine.net is a project that visualizes data using food as the actual medium. In the picture above you are seeing gin and tonics that actually glow in the dark. They represent accidents at Belgium’s nuclear power plants and each gel globules floating in the drinks represents 1,000 people  living within a 30km radius of the blast.

Just… what can we say about how creative and informative this is? What looks like delicious drinks turns out to actually be a great object lesson and data visualization about the possible dangers of nuclear power. Every sip you take makes you think about the data you are actually drinking.

And it doesn’t stop there. We had a great time just browsing through the website and laughing our heads off at the clever names for the different data visualizations, whether it was Nobel du Chocolate (nobel prize winners in chocolate), Zuckerberg pops (Facebook use in different countries) or Tweeting tabouleh (tweets broken down by geographic location).

Until next time,

The VisualCrew