We mapped 25,000 recipes across two hidden dimensions: biological pleasure vs. healthiness.
Every ingredient sits somewhere on two axes: how healthy it is, and how strongly it carries mood-active compounds.
Hover a point to see which ingredient it is. The cloud isn't two camps. It's a continuum, and the interesting action happens in the upper-right, where healthy and mood-rich meet.
Hover to explore!
Each bubble is a food category. Its position maps the average health score vs. average mood score of every recipe in that group. Bubble size shows how many recipes it contains.
Comfort Food and Cocktails cluster upper-left: high mood, low health while Healthy Recipes anchor the opposite corner. Most cuisines sit uncomfortably in between.
Hover a bubble to see the full breakdown.
Not all mood-active ingredients are equal. Some energize, some sharpen focus, others cloud it. Filter by mood type to see which ingredients dominate each effect.
Notice caffeine and theobromine leading the "Alert" cluster while fatty acids drift toward the sluggish end.
Filter by mood · Hover bars for details
Follow the flow: each ingredient category connects to the moods it most commonly triggers. Ribbon thickness reflects how often those ingredients appear across all recipes.
Vegetables and fruits flow toward alertness and focus. Meat and dairy split between clarity and sluggishness. Spices are surprisingly stimulating.
Hover any ribbon to see the flow volume.
Pick up to three recipes and see how their chemistry stacks up on the most common mood-active compounds.
Different shapes, different stories. A pasta dish and a salad bowl can share surprising chemistry, or none at all.
Over five decades, the trajectories diverge. Ready-meal spending climbs steadily while fresh produce slowly loses ground. The shift isn't dramatic year-to-year, it compounds.
Recession bands mark the years when comfort spending spiked hardest. Hard times, comforting food.
Multi-line, 1974–2024. Grey bands = recession years.
This network shows how ingredients share molecular compounds...
Nodes = Ingredients. Edges = Shared compounds.