Computational Gastronomy

GANESH BAGLER
http://cosylab.iiitd.edu.in

An emerging data science of food, flavors and health

An aspiring astronomer

Dieter Spears | Inhaus Creative

From astronomy to gastronomy

IHBT

SFI

CCMB
Computational Gastronomy is a data science
that blends food, data, and computation for
data-driven food innovations
‘Catching Fire—How cooking made us human’ by Richard Wrangham
Image Credits: Chloe Cushman
Image Credits: Chloe Cushman
Innovation [noun]

make changes in something established,

especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.

The Enquirer, Vraja Kishor's Blog

DATA
Making Food Computable
Why do we eat what we eat?
Why do we combine ingredients
in our recipes the way we do?
 Food Pairing Hypothesis
Ingredients that taste similar tend to be used together
in traditional recipes

Ahn et. al, “Flavor network and the principles of food pairing”, Scientific Reports (2011).
A Jain, NK Rakhi, G Bagler*, “Spices form the basis of food pairing in Indian cuisine”, arXiv:1502.03815 (2015).
Ganesh Bagler*, ‘The digital way forward for the Indian Cuisine’ (2019). Image Courtesy: FSSAI EatRight Mela Poster, Dec 2018
 Recipes & Ingredients
2543 Traditional Indian Recipes (TarlaDalal)
Regional cuisines: Bengali, Gujarati, Jain, Maharashtrian,
Mughlai, Punjabi, Rajasthani, South Indian.

A Jain, NK Rakhi & G Bagler,* “Analysis of Food Pairing in Regional Cuisines of India”, PLoS ONE, 10(10): e0139539(2015).
 Olfactory

fla•vor = smell + taste

Gustatory
Fenaroli’s Handbook
 Ahn et. al, Sci.Rep. (2011)

Uniform Food Pairing

Western Cuisines

𝑅𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑚 𝐶𝑢𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑒

Indian Cuisine
Contrasting Food Pairing
Jain et. al, PLoS ONE (2015)
Spices are key to the food pairing in Indian cuisine

Food Pairing
12

10
Spice
Vegetable
Fruit
8
Plant derivative
Nut/seed
Cereal/Crop
6 Dairy
Plant
Herb
4 Original recipes

A Jain, NK Rakhi, G Bagler*, “Spices form the basis of food pairing in Indian cuisine”, arXiv:1502.03815 (2015).
 Spice
The Taste of India

Anupam Jain, NK Rakhi and Ganesh Bagler*, arXiv (2015); Anupam Jain, NK Rakhi and Ganesh Bagler*, PLoS ONE (2015).
A Jain, NK Rakhi and G Bagler*, arXiv (2015); A Jain, NK Rakhi and G Bagler*, PLoS ONE (2015).
 Best of 2015
MIT Technology Review

A Jain, NK Rakhi and G Bagler*, arXiv (2015); A Jain, NK Rakhi and G Bagler*, PLoS ONE (2015).
 Making Food Computable
————————————————
Data-Driven Food Innovations
 RecipeDB

Batra et al., ‘RecipeDB: A resource for exploring recipes’, Database (2020).

Navjot Singh and Ganesh Bagler*, IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, DÉCOR, Paris (2018).
 The Tree of World Cuisines

G Bagler*, N Singh, R Tuwani, et. al. (2019). Jain and Bagler, Physica A (2019).
R Tuwani, N Sahu, G Bagler*, IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, DÉCOR, Macau, China (2019).
T Sharma, et al., ‘Hierarchical Clustering of World Cuisines’, International Conference on Data Engineering (2020).
 30
10
 Credits: Wiki; Wired
Y Agarwal, D Batra and G Bagler*, ‘Building Hierarchically Disentangled Language Models for Text Generation with Named Entities’, COLING (2020).
https://cosylab.iiitd.edu.in/ratatouille
https://cosylab.iiitd.edu.in/ratatouille
http://cosylab.iiitd.edu.in/flavordb
 http://cosylab.iiitd.edu.in/flavordb/

Nucleic Acids Research (2017). Complex Systems Laboratory, IIIT-Delhi

 Taste Prediction

Bitter Sweet

Scientific Reports (2019)

https://cosylab.iiitd.edu.in/bittersweet
 How sweet is that?
Preliminary results

A Sharma, S Jain, R Tuwani and G Bagler*, ‘Machine learning models for predicting sweetness of a compound,’ manuscript under preparation (2020).
 Computational Food

The
TheDrug-Maker’s
Food Maker’sGuide to the
Guide to Galaxy
the Galaxy
How
HowMachine
MachineLearning
Learningand
andBig
BigData
Datacan
arehelp chemists
helping search
chemists
search
the vastthe vast chemical
chemical universeuniverse forfood
for better better medicines

Adapted from the ‘The Drug Maker’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ A. Mullard, Nature (2017)
Why spices? Broad-spectrum benevolence of culinary herbs and spices
“Data-driven analysis of biomedical literature suggests broad-spectrum benefits of culinary herbs and spices,”
Rakhi NK, Tuwani R, Mukherjee J, Bagler G, PLoS ONE 13(5): e0198030 (2018).
R Tuwani, Rakhi NK, N Garg and G Bagler*, under review; R Tuwani, Rakhi NK, and G Bagler*, under review.
 Personalized Nutrition

Gut Microbes

Blood tests

Questionnaires

Body Mass Index

Food diary

Design personalized diet to

lower glucose levels

ED Sonnenburg and JL Sonnenburg, Nature, 528, 484 (2015).

Zeevi et al., “Personalized nutrition by prediction of glycemic response”, Cell, 163, 1079 (2015).
Computational Gastronomy — Data-driven food innovations

Computational Gastronomy = Food + Artificial Intelligence

“ The discovery of a new dish confers
more happiness on humanity, than the

”
discovery of a new star.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Computational Gastronomy is a data science
that blends food, data, and computation for
data-driven food innovations.
DATA
Making Food Computable
Four major aspects of Computational Gastronomy Data

1. Recipes – Information of recipes that reflects its

constituent ingredients.

Further, this could also include details of the temporal

sequence of ingredients, the quantity of each ingredient,
their state (chopped, ground, etc.), size and the method
of processing ingredients (cook, boil, fry, saute, etc.).
Four major aspects of Computational Gastronomy Data

2. Flavor Profiles of Ingredients: Every natural

ingredient that is used in recipes is primarily selected
based on its flavors—taste and odor.

The flavor profile of the ingredient represents the set

of empirically reported flavor molecules.
Four major aspects of Computational Gastronomy Data

3. Health Associations of Ingredients:

Each ingredient may be associated with the health

impacts as identified from experimental studies
linking them to diseases.
Four major aspects of Computational Gastronomy Data

4. Nutritional Profile of Ingredients:

Each ingredient can be associated with its

nutritional profile, including macro- as well as
micro-nutrients.
 Potential Data-Driven Food Innovations

Novel Recipes Design: Cooking is a combinatorial

system that combines the raw material (ingredients)
and ways of processing them (cooking rules). Given
that the average recipe uses 10 ingredients and that
there are around 1000 unique ingredients, one could
create around 1030 recipes simply with the power of
combinations. Not every such ‘recipe’ would be
palatable, leave alone delicious. Knowing the patterns
in the traditional recipes from various cuisines, one
could filter recipes that conform to the cultural norms.
This requires the use of statistics, data/patterns mining,
and natural language processing.
 Potential Data-Driven Food Innovations

Culinary Fingerprints: Starting with the tripartite

data of recipes, their constituent ingredients and
further the flavor profiles of ingredients, one could
mine for patterns in traditional recipes to obtain the
‘culinary fingerprints’ of cuisines. These fingerprints
represent the characteristic pattern of ingredient co-
use as well as the idiosyncratic flavor patterns of a
cuisine depicting the culinary preferences of a
population. Such insights are of value for food/recipe
design for targeted audiences.
 Potential Data-Driven Food Innovations

Taste/Odor Prediction: Large compilation of flavor

molecules along with their taste/odor attributes
presents an interesting case for machine learning-
based taste and odor prediction algorithms. Here
the battery of molecular properties (starting from
simple ones such as number of atoms, molecular
weight to all the way up to molecular fingerprints
comprising of thousands of attributes) are features
which could be used for building statistical models
for classification into taste and odor classes.
 Potential Data-Driven Food Innovations

De novo design of flavor/taste molecules: Along

with in silico methods for generation of organic
compounds, taste/odor classification models can
enable de novo synthesis of compounds of
desirable profile.
 Potential Data-Driven Food Innovations

Healthy and Sustainable Diet Design:

Systematically curated data of health impacts of
ingredients, along with rules of making recipes, can
be used for designing potentially healthy recipes.
Interestingly, such strategies could be used to
propel the use of ingredients for promoting a
sustainable food culture.
Impact of Technology on Food

Scientific American, June 2015

Ganesh Bagler
Center for Computational Biology, IIIT-Delhi, New Delhi.
Ingredient Categories: Forms and Shapes
• Vegetable: All kind of leafy vegetables (spinach,
fenugreek), beans (kidney bean, red beans), tubers
(potato, turnip, beetroot) and such.
• Spice: Flavorful ingredients primarily from root, bark
and seeds. Examples: cumin, clove, cardamom,
cinnamon, turmeric etc.
• Herb: Flavorful ingredients primarily from leaves and
stems of plants. Examples: coriander, thyme, rosemary,
mint, basil etc.
• Pulse: The fruit or seed. Examples: chickpeas, green
gram, back gram, pigeon pea etc.
Ingredient Categories: Forms and Shapes

• Cereal/Crop: Examples: rice, oat, sorghum, barley etc.

• Plant: Examples: tea, thistle, pine, hop
• Fruit: Examples: apple, orange, guava, grape, papaya
etc.
• Flower: rose, jasmine, lavender, artichoke etc.
• Nut/Seed: Examples: peanut, walnut, hazelnut, filbert
etc.
• Dairy: Example: milk, curd/yogurt, butter, buttermilk,
cream, cheese, whey etc.
Ingredient Categories: Forms and Shapes

• Meat: Examples: beef, pork, mutton, chicken etc.

• Fish: Examples: salmon, codfish, tuna, catfish, bluefish
etc.
• Seafood: Examples: lobster, mollusk, oyster, prawn,
shrimp, kombu, kelp etc.
• Beverage-Alcoholic: Examples: rum, gin, wine, whisky
etc.
• Beverage: fruit juice, soft drink, milk shake etc.
• Additives: salt, sugar, Monosoldium glutamate (MSG)
Scientific American, June 2015
Scientific American, June 2015
Scientific American, June 2015
Scientific American, June 2015
 Processed Food
It is the dark force, we’re told, behind the obesity
epidemic, and the death of the family farm.

But humans have been “processing” food ever

since we learned how to cook, preserve, ferment,
freeze, dry or extract.

Processed food has powered the evolution of the

species, the expansion of empires, the
exploration of space.

Scientific American, June 2015

 Noodles
Pickles 2000BC
2400BC

Palm Oil
3000BC

Roasted Meat
1.8mya

Bread Olive Oil

Cheese 4500BC
12000ya Tortillas 5000BC
6700BC

Beer Wine
7000-3000BC 5400BC
Scientific American, June 2015
 Peanut Butter
15th Century

Chocolate
1900BC

Salt Cod
10th Century
Bacon Tofu
1500BC 965AD

Sushi
700AD
Jiang
1000BC

Sugar Mustard Kimchi

500BC 400AD 700AD

Scientific American, June 2015

 Carbonated Water
1767

Corn Flakes
Coffee 1894
15th Century

Monosodium Glutamate Lab Grown Meat

1808 2013

High Fructose
Spam Chicken Nuggets Corn Syrup Tang
Plumpy’Nut
1926 1950 1957 1959
1996

Scientific American, June 2015

Google Images
The
Impossible
Burger
Cooked – Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma –
Michael Pollan
The Botony of Desire– Michael
Pollan
Fast Food Nation – Eric
Schlossler
Recipe Data Analytics
 Recipes: Data and Analysis
• What is a cuisine??
– Geo-cultural defn; Geographical indication; the Rosogulla conundrum
– History of recipe documentation; Missing/lost recipes

• Coarse-grained data & spherical cows

• Recipe Structure
– Ingredients & Cooking Instructions
• Recipe Size Distribution
– The normal distribution & inferences
• Ingredient Popularity
– The generic pattern across cuisines
• Category Composition
• Mining Patterns in Recipes
– Ingredient pairing
– Frequent Itemset Mining
 Recipes Data Structure
_________________________________ RECIPE _________________________________

INGREDIENTS SECTION

100gsms, potato, sliced

50gms, capsicum, finely chopped
50 gms Onions, chopped
100ml groundnut oil
10gms, cumin, crushed
10gms, turmeric
20gms, chilly power
To taste, salt

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS

1. Add oil to pan and heat it for 3-4 minutes.

2. Add cumin and then add onion. Fry for 3-4 minutes
3. Add potato and capsicum. Fry for 8-10 minutes.
4. Add turmeric, cumin and salt. Mix thoroughly.
5. Keep the mixture on low heat for another 5 minutes.
 Recipes & Ingredients
2543 Traditional Indian Recipes (TarlaDalal)
Regional cuisines: Bengali, Gujarati, Jain, Maharashtrian,
Mughlai, Punjabi, Rajasthani, South Indian.

A Jain, NK Rakhi & G Bagler,* “Analysis of Food Pairing in Regional Cuisines of India”, PLoS ONE, 10(10): e0139539(2015).
Recipes Data
 Recipes Data Structure
Recipe-01 : Ingredient-01, Ingredient-02, Ingredient-15, Ingredient-19, Ingredient-06
Recipe-02 : Ingredient-06, Ingredient-12, Ingredient-08, Ingredient-15

.
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.

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.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.

Recipe-100: Ingredient-06, Ingredient-11, Ingredient-15, Ingredient-13

Recipes Data Structure
Recipe-01 — Ingredient-01
Recipe-01 — Ingredient-02
Recipe-01 — Ingredient-15
Recipe-01 — Ingredient-19
Recipe-01 — Ingredient-06

Recipe-02 — Ingredient-06
Recipe-02 — Ingredient-12
Recipe-02 — Ingredient-08
Recipe-02 — Ingredient-15
.
.
.
.
.
.

Recipe-100 — Ingredient-06
Recipe-100 — Ingredient-11
Recipe-100 — Ingredient-15
Recipe-100 — Ingredient-13
 Recipes Data Statistics

The recipe size distribution of recipes is observed to follow a

normal distribution.
 Recipes Data Statistics

The nature of the Frequency-Rank statistics is observed to consistently present

with a power law across the world cuisines.
Recipes Data Statistics
Recipes Data Statistics