Measuring Global Food Sentiment One Tweet at a 
Time
* Why? 
Culture Status Mood Place
Food is 
* political
Food is 
* political
* Food is emotional
Food is a 
* business
Food is an * emotional business
Food is at a 
tipping point *
Project Goal 
Barometer of food consumption + the 
related emotional responses amongst 
Twitter users 
Relate this to the wealth + obesity levels 
*
* Data 
“I had…..lunch” 
“I ate…..”
* Process
* Insights
*Insights 
o Majority positive sentiment
*Top 50 most Tweeted about Foods
Fast-food companies * dominate the food landscape 
Pic: the noun project
Meat: often tweeted * + high sentiment 
Pic: the noun project
Culture-* specific Foods
* Stark differences between neighbours 
Zimbabwe: 
curried goat 
South Africa: 
lemon meringue pie 
Pic: Superfad the noun project
* Traces of the past 
Pic: the noun project
* Engagement
* Partners
* Credits 
www.foodmood.in www.affectlab.org 
@natalie_dixon natalie@affectlab.org

Presentation at 6th International AAAI Conference On Weblogs And Social Media

Editor's Notes

  • #9 You can gauge the flavour of a city by its street food
  • #10 Food consciousness, food issues, food consumerism has never had been more important  obesity levels are set to reach record highs More than 40 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2010. Worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980.
  • #14 Treemap data visualization: Foodstuffs are represented by blocks colour to denotes emotion and size of the blocks represents the volume of tweets for that foodstuff
  • #18 Explore both popularity and sentiment of food for a country Visualize data for a point of time or interval Compare countries Search foods
  • #23 Not all fast-food companies enjoy equal sentiment ratings in all countries
  • #26 Stark comparisons between neighbours + food choices
  • #27 Digital traces/ food history
  • #28 As the dataset grows so researchers can ask questions about why some foods are more engaging than others…
  • #29 FOOD ENGAGEMENT!