
Why Good Visualization Matters: Rethinking the Food Label - apievangelist
http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/09/23/why-good-visualization-matters-rethinking-the-food-label/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+infochimps-blog+%28blog.infochimps.org%29
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hugh3
I'm not sure this is great visualization.

Firstly, trace ingredients are often what's important to the consumer. Fine, I
know my peanut butter is mostly peanuts, but how much salt is there?

Secondly, these are simple examples. What do you do with, say, a can of
chicken and vegetable and noodle soup, which could easily have thirty
ingredients before you even start counting the potentially-nasty additives
down in a tiny box in the corner.

Thirdly, apparently labellers aren't obliged to split up certain categories
(eg broccoli, sugar snap peas, green beans and carrots are all in a single
green square). So presumably this doesn't even solve the specified problem of
not knowing how much white vs whole wheat is in your food -- why would you
split up white and whole wheat into separate categories when beans and carrots
are the same?

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calebmpeterson
> Secondly, these are simple examples. What do you do with, say, a can of
> chicken and vegetable and noodle soup, which could easily have thirty
> ingredients before you even start counting the potentially-nasty additives
> down in a tiny box in the corner.

How about inverting the tree-map such that the smaller the amount, the greater
the portion of the tree-map taken up? You're going to need all of that space
anyway for the names of those potentially-nasty additives to be printed in a
legible font size...

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hugh3
Ah, the homeopathic approach to food labelling. I'm gonna sprinkle a grain of
gold dust on every twinkie I sell, just to screw with the label.

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oscilloscope
A few friends of mine built something similar. Loaded the USDA nutrition
database in a dropdown, and scaled 24 vitamins, nutrients, calories, etc by
recommended daily intake:

<http://exposedata.com/intake/foodpick.html> (takes a minute to load)

Many people have told me an added layer of discovering foods with particular
nutritional qualities (filtering, sorting) would be very appealing. A
recommendation engine for food.

If you're looking to hack on the dataset, check out this JSON version:

<http://ashleyw.co.uk/project/food-nutrient-database>

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andreyon
wow, that's really cool!

can they make a side by side comparator? it doesn't have to actually compare,
can be just another frame ( or frames) where I can select the same and do the
comparison myself.

For example I want to see the differences in raw broccoli and steamed
broccoli.

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oscilloscope
Open two browser windows ;)

Here are a few other concepts we messed around with:

<http://fleetinbeing.net/intake/web/rdi.html> (stacked bars)

<http://fleetinbeing.net/intake/web/groups.html> (hover to see
vegetable/nutrients)

<http://fleetinbeing.net/intake/web/matrix.html> (matrix plot)

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SeanLuke
This is pretty bad I think. The amount of substance by mass is nearly
completely unimportant. Consider a package which has 99.999% Organic Apples
and 0.001% Plutonium. But hey, it's 99.999% organic! Look at all that red!

Much better is a simple ordered list of ingredients, so we're not bamboozled
into ignoring certain ingredients just because they're not the majority of the
content. But wait, thats ... what we already have on our packaging? What good
visualization!

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rossriley
The new food labelling in the UK is based on a traffic light principle and,
imho seems to be clearer:
[http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44434000/jpg/_44434134...](http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44434000/jpg/_44434134_foodlabel203pa.jpg)

The problem with this exaple is that it's hard to see quickly what the key
points are, since prominence is automatically given to higher scores, whether
they're good or bad.

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aaronblohowiak
IMHO, the Nutrition Information box is actually a shining example of good
design already. It is very, very legible and has a clear information
hierarchy.

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astarwithin
I like knowing how much of things is in my food. :)

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notatoad
it's a cool idea, but i believe most manufacturers would claim 'trade secrets'
protections before putting proportions on their labels.

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jzb
They'd claim something to avoid having to make it easy to visualize just
what's in processed food...

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rorrr
His example with 5 ingredients in unreadable already. What will happen with
10-20?

