A Century of American Food by Rik Ghosh

Americans are thought to be fond of following fad diets, paradigms of eating often based on novel, ever-changing nutrition research. This project is concerned with finding in actuality how American food consumption has changed throughout the past century and illustrating to what extent it responds to relevant historical events. Towards that end, it considers the distribution of foods in the American food supply, which are—to some extent—the foods that Americans desire to eat and—ultimately—the foods that are available for them to eat. Tracking this over a span of 100 “year”s, the visualization consists of a timeline exploring this changing distribution, which is then punctuated by qualitative information about significant events in areas like nutrition research, agricultural technology, trend diets, and official dietary guidelines. The project superimposes all of this information to create an honest depiction of the food supply (and, indirectly, food consumption) in America today and in the past. Avoiding reductive statistics and statements, it curates multiple previously uncombined sources of data and portrays them clearly and plainly; in doing so, it invites instructed readers to discover relationships between them.