Posts Tagged ‘Flowing Data’
“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”*…
Back in 2016, Nathan Yau of Flowing Data created a fascinating set of animated infographics illustrating how the American diet had changed over the prior several decades. A few years later, he used an even more comprehensive data set to update the picture…
The United States Department of Agriculture keeps track of food availability for over 200 items, which can be used to estimate food consumption at the national level. They have data for 1970 through 2019, so we can for example, see how much beef Americans consume per year on average and how that has changed over four decades.
So that’s what I did.
How long will chicken reign supreme? Who wins between lemon and lime? Is nonfat ice cream really ice cream? Does grapefruit ever make a comeback? Find out in the charts below.
The rankings are broken into six main food groups: proteins [pictured above], vegetables, fruits, dairy, grains, and added fats…
Illuminating: “Seeing How Much [and of what] We Ate Over the Years,” from @flowingdata (where one will find larger, more legible versions of the chart above and its companions).
* Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
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As we contemplate consumption, we might recall that it was on this date in 1953 that the Cabinet-level Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was created under President Eisenhower. Its first Secretary was Oveta Culp Hobby. (In 1979, the Department of Education Organization Act was signed into law, providing for a separate Department of Education. HEW became the Department of Health and Human Services, officially arriving on May 4, 1980.)
“Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?”*…
From our old friend (see, e.g., here and here) Flowing Data‘s Nathan Yau…
I read that there are more golf courses than there are McDonald’s locations in the United States, which seemed surprising. There are about 16,000 golf courses and 13,000 McDonald’s locations. How could this be? Obviously, there are a lot of McDonald’s locations, but where are all these golf courses? Some maps made it clear.
[The yellow circles in the map above show] the distribution of McDonald’s locations across the conterminous United States. As you might expect, they concentrate around cities.
An area in East Los Angeles has 110 locations within a 10-mile radius, which makes it the most dense area. This makes sense because McDonald’s was founded in southern California. The second most is an area just outside Chicago with 88 locations. This also makes sense, because McDonald’s headquarters are in Chicago.
At first glance, [the distribution of] golf courses [the green circles in the map above] looks similar to the McDonald’s one. There is a higher concentration around cities, but golf courses are more widespread, especially in the Midwest.
This makes more sense now. You can have a golf course in an area where there aren’t that many people, because people will travel to play golf. Few people are going to travel specifically for McDonald’s.
…
The high number of golf courses along the Florida coast and in the northeast jump out to me, someone who has never played a round of golf. I also noticed it’s fairly common for smaller golf courses to sit next to each other, whereas you’re not going to see neighboring McDonald’s restaurants, which seems to contribute to the higher totals for the former…
Amazing but true: “McDonald’s Locations vs. Golf Courses,” from @flowingdata.
* Ray Kroc (founder of McDonalds-as-we-know-it)
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As we get down with data, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Byron Nelson teed off in the first round of the 1945 Miami International Four Ball Tournament. For five months– from that swing through August 4– he was untouchable: Nelson won that tournament and his next 10, a record 11 events in a row, and shot 50 consecutive rounds under par.
“Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside”*…
A logistical note to those readers who subscribe by email: Google is discontinuing the Feedburner email service that (Roughly) Daily has used since its inception; so email will now be going via Mailchimp. That should be relatively seamless– no re-subscription required– but there may be a day or two of duplicate emails, as I’m not sure how quickly changes take effect at Feedburner. If so, my apologies. For those who don’t get (Roughly) Daily in their inboxes but would like to, the sign-up box is to the right… it’s quick, painless, and can, if you change your mind, be terminated with a click. And now, to today’s business…
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 [a wonderful interactive chart], 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….
The always-illuminating Nathan Yau (@flowingdata) lets us see what we ate on an average day, for the past several decades: “The Changing American Diet.” Watch chicken zoom from behind… see carrots have a moment… puzzle over the state of dark leafy greens…
[Image above: source]
* Mark Twain
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As we ponder the perseverance of meat and potatoes, we might send tasty birthday greetings to Nathan Handwerker; he was born on this date in 1892. In 1916, with $300 borrowed from friends, he and his wife Ida started a hot dog stand on Coney Island– and launched what evolved into Nathan’s Famous restaurants and the related Nathan’s retail product line.
An emigrant from Eastern Europe, Handwerker found a job slicing bread rolls for Feltman’s German Gardens, a Coney Island restaurant that sold franks (hot dogs) for 10 cents each. Encouraged by a singing waiter there and his piano player– Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante– Handwerker struck out on his own, selling his hot dogs (spiced with Ida’s secret recipe) for a nickel. At the outset of his new venture, he reputedly hired young men to wear white coats with stethoscopes around their necks to stand near his carts and eat his hot dogs, giving the impression of purity and cleanliness.
Handwerker named his previously unnamed hot dog stand Nathan’s Hot Dogs in 1921 after Sophie Tucker, then a singer at the nearby Carey Walsh’s Cafe, made a hit of the song “Nathan, Nathan, Why You Waitin?”
“I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians”*…
Nathan Yau, the force behind the fabulous Flowing Data, was lamenting the loss of a classic resource, when he decided to take on the challenge himself:
Ever since I found out about the Statistical Atlas of the United States, historically produced by the Census Bureau, it annoyed me that there wasn’t one in the works for the 2010 Census due to cuts in funding. The last one was for 2000. Actually, the 2000 edition was called the Census Atlas, but whatever. With more data than ever, it seems like there should be one.
Maybe that’s why there’s isn’t one. Too much data, too much of an undertaking, and too many bureaucratic decisions to make.
The first Atlas, by Francis A. Walker, was published in 1874 using the data from the prior 1870 Census. Counting cover, credits, and all that, it was 56 pages.
I got to thinking, hey, I could do that. And if I did, I wouldn’t have to be annoyed anymore. So I recreated the original Statistical Atlas of the United States with current data. I used similar styling, and had one main rule for myself. All the data had to be publicly available and come from government sites…
See the stunning– and stunningly useful– results (with larger versions of each chart) at “Reviving the Statistical Atlas of the United States with New Data.”
* “I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s?” – Hal Varian, The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2009
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As we discriminate between the median and the mean, we might spare a thought for Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson; he died on this date in 1948. A classics scholar who was also an accomplished biologist and mathematician, Thompson is best remembered for On Growth and Form (1917, new ed. 1942), a profound consideration of the shapes of living things, starting from the simple premise that “everything is the way it is because it got that way.” Thus one must study not only finished forms, but also the forces that molded them: “the form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces’, in this sense, at least, that from it we can judge of or deduce the forces that are acting or have acted upon it.”
The book paved the way for the scientific explanation of morphogenesis, the process by which patterns are formed in plants and animals. Thompson’s description of the mathematical beauty of nature inspired thinkers as diverse as Alan Turing and Claude Levi-Strauss, and artists including Henry Moore, Salvador Dali, and Jackson Pollock. Peter Medawar, the 1960 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, called On Growth and Form “the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue.”
Rules of thumb for folks who are all thumbs…
“The 30-Second Rule, A Decision Tree” by Audrey Fukman and Andy Wright
Click here for a larger version
(from SFoodie, via Flowing Data)
As to the title of the chart, see “To eat or not to eat: seniors prove ‘five-second rule’ more like 30,” from Connecticut College…
As we stoop to conquer, we might recall that it was on this date in 1848 that James Wilson Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill, in Coloma, California. When news of the discovery spread, some 300,000 men, women, and children flocked to California, picks and pans in hand, from the rest of the United States and abroad– the California Gold Rush was on.
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