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Above: Rhythm of Food-Selected Animations sourced from Truth & Beauty’s website.

Google News Lab and Truth & Beauty‘s Rhythm of Food (uses Google search interest to reveal food trends over the years. At first, they compiled this data in a normal line graph specific for every kind of trend in food. However, realizing the potential to dig deeper and better analyze this data, they collected weekly Google Trends data for hundreds of dishes and ingredients, over twelve years and plotted the results on a one year clock. What I find intriguing is this decision to plot the data on a one year clock, considering they had collected 12 years worth of data. It seems their rationale was to harrow in and have viewers see the correlation between seasons and food trends, in addition of time, versus only seeing the difference over time. I admire their decision to do this because it took the extra step of thinking of a new way to visualize food trends that people are most familiar with. The changing of seasons is something that is very prominently linked to food trends, a hidden trend we didn’t realize in terms of data. In addition, the decision to shape and orient the graph in such a way similar to a clock is interesting as it reminds us of the cyclical nature of this data, while still effectively demonstrating the scale of the number of these searches. According to Truth & Beauty, the project was built using  ES2015, webpack, react, Material UI, and d3 v4. The color scale used for the years is viridis.