FoodMood: Measuring Global Food Sentiment One Tweet at a Time

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 6

Volume

Vol. 6 No. 5 (2012): ICWSM Workshop Technical Report WS-12-04 (When the City Meets the Citizen)

When the City Meets the Citizen

Do Happy Meals really make us happy? Do salads make us blue? Is cake our comfort? FoodMood is an interactive data visualisation project that gives citizens a rare opportunity to engage and reflect, acknowledge, and understand the connection between emotion, obesity and food. The project explores the opportunities presented by the data-sharing world of today’s cities using global English-language tweets about food coupled with sentiment analysis. It aims to gain a better understanding of global food consumption patterns and its impact on the daily emotional well-being of people against the backdrop of country data such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and obesity levels. A key finding is that tweets can be used to find a relationship between certain foods, food sentiment and obesity levels in countries. Overall FoodMood shows a majority positive sentiment towards food. Other findings, although constantly evolving, indicate trends such as: globally meat enjoys a high sentiment rating and is often tweeted about; fast-food companies dominate the food consumption landscapes of most countries’ tweets although not all of them enjoy equal sentiment ratings across countries. Ultimately, FoodMood reveals a hidden layer of meaningful digital, social, and cultural data that provide a basis for further analysis.

10.1609/icwsm.v6i5.14221