Rhythm of Food is a web page designed by Google News Lab and Truth and Beauty that graphs internet searches for food on Google by year and season to track the popularity of different foods throughout the year and over time. Truth & Beauty is an independent designer, consultant and researcher, Moritz Stefaner. He works with clients to make beautiful data visualization. The data used comes from Google Trends and pulls only from Google Knowledge Graph topics (those topics that merit a right sidebar when searched on Google). This is because just using words that aren’t selected for a specific sidebar won’t necessarily parse different meanings of the same word (orange the fruit vs orange the color).
That data is then organized into a circular graph which tracks popularity of a word by the radius of each individual point in the circle. The points are also colored by year to show the popularity trend from one year to another. The points are selectable so that you can pinpoint exactly how many times a word was searched in any month from 2004 to 2018.
The webpage provides numerous graphs of words that might be of interest to the visitor, and also customizable folders where visitors can view data organized alphabetically, by the position of peaks and by consistency. It also provides a bar that highlights different types of foods, seasonal ranges, and special categories including “charts that look like foods”. A user can also look up a food of their choice to see if a chart has been made. If so, the trend over time graph and circular graph (with animation of plotted points) appear.
This webpage is very beautiful and uses the animated circular graphs as the centerpiece of their content. I do wonder what more information could be added, like location. They have two graphs that illustrate two google searches in Germany and Japan but the webpage doesn’t provide any more international information. Ultimately this webpage is likely aimed at casual viewers who are interested in the data and enjoy beautiful computer graphics. The webpage could expand their data but likely don’t need to for their target audience.
