Using social media to explore regional cuisine preferences in China

Abstract

Purpose Food plays an important role in every culture around the world. Recently, cuisine preference analysis has become a popular research topic. However, most of these studies are conducted through questionnaires and interviews, which are highly limited by the time, cost and scope of data collection, especially when facing large-scale survey studies. Some researchers have, therefore, attempted to mine cuisine preferences based on online recipes, while this approach cannot reveal food preference from people’s perspective. Today, people are sharing what they eat on social media platforms by posting reviews about the meal, reciting the names of appetizers or entrees, and photographing as well. Such large amount of user-generated contents (UGC) has potential to indicate people’s preferences over different cuisines. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to explore Chinese cuisine preferences among online users of social media. Design/methodology/approach Based on both UGC and online recipes, the authors first investigated the cuisine preference distribution in different regions. Then, dish preference similarity between regions was calculated and few geographic factors were identified, which might lead to such regional similarity appeared in our study. By applying hierarchical clustering, the authors clustered regions based on dish preference and ingredient usage separately. Findings Experimental results show that, among 20 types of traditional Chinese cuisines, Sichuan cuisine is most favored across all regions in China. Geographical proximity is the more closely related to differences of regional dish preference than climate proximity. Originality/value Different from traditional definitions of regions to which cuisine belong, the authors found new association between region and cuisine based on dish preference from social media and ingredient usage of dishes. Using social media may overcome problems with using traditional questionnaires, such as high costs and long cycle for questionnaire design and answering.

Exploring the Determinants of Food Choice in Chinese Mainlanders and Chinese Immigrants: A Systematic Review

“…Two document analysis studies collecting people's food review microblogs, found that people living in geographically close areas, rather than climate-close areas, had similar cuisine preferences [46]. They also identified that humidity influenced diet preferences more than temperature [46]. Season, eating ambience, and food appearance also affected participants' food preferences [48].…”

“…Firstly, this review included 17 qualitative studies recruiting immigrants living outside of China, whereas only 8 studies researched Chinese mainlanders. Two studies conducted in China used a document analysis approach which only examined participant food reviews and did not provide a complete picture of food choice determinants [46,48]. A third study (conducted in China and written in Mandarin) was determined to be of poor methodological quality due to its very limited information about participant recruitment, interview methods, and data analysis approach, and did not adequately report the participants' determinants of food choice [33].…”

“…The most common data collection tool used in qualitative studies, the interview, cannot explore subconscious factors involved in food choice decision-making. However, this review also included two studies that used document analysis as the data collection method [46,48]. By collecting Chinese people's food review microblogs and analysing the text along with blogger's demographic characteristics, the researchers discovered several influencers that were not identified by the interview-based method, such as, climate, temperature, and humidity.…”

Visual Cultural Biases in Food Classification

“…It is well-known that food preferences vary geographically, both across [12] and within countries [13]. This also applies to visual preferences for food [14], with scholars arguing that if such cultural-related context factors are ignored when developing recommendation systems, biased (and therefore poorer) recommendations will be provided [14]. This makes the relationship between the origin of the food and the individual to whom it should be recommended an important one.…”

Food and beverage pairing from a sensory and cultural perspective = Maridaje de alimentos y bebidas desde una perspectiva sensorial y cultural

“…Social media is gaining relevance by being transformed into valuable sources of information and communication, including about food (Zhang et al, 2019). The main reason is that nowadays people tend to share information, pictures or videos of food, recipes or posts from family and friends sharing what they have eaten or will eat (Simeone & Scarpato, 2020).…”