Plain old food type
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It would be good to have a plain old "food" type (very much like beverage) and perhaps a "food genre" type (fruit, dessert, meat, vegetable etc). There's lots of very simple things we can say about food that there's no way to express right now.
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I have to agree.. then we could list the ingredients of Twinkie which appears in the wikipedia article.
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Lets start thediscussion on food... My primary interest is in nutritional information and ingredients of "complex" foods. But I think this gets complex reasonably quickly.
For example, some brand of crackers may contain powered cheddar cheese, which is itself a food. But the nutritional value of the crackers probably can't be easily derived from Cheddar Cheese.. not to mention that Cheddar Cheese is itself a food. Cheddar Cheese contains cow's milk and rennet, but I don't think we'd consider rennet itself a food.
So my proposal is a type Food which has an included type Ingredient, as well as a property Ingredients which points to a list of Ingredients.
Food would have properties like Genre, maybe Country of origin, etc... but Ingredient would have stuff like "Nutritional information"
Nutritional Information would be a CVT which would indicate how many units of some nutritional thing, normalized to a "per 100g" unit (I think that's the standard in Europe, and the US is based on Serving Size, which is totally non-normalizable)
for example, cheddar cheese might have "2 mg of Vitamin A" - so the CVT for Nutritional Value would have an Integer quantity, a mass unit unit, and a nutritional thing.
Thoughts? I'll model this up on sandbox...
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Also a property for the basic food type called 'form' or something similar would help add more detail to the original food type. You example of crackers containing powdered cheddar cheese is a good candidate. In that scneario 'ingrediant' itself would be a cvt between food A, food B and the form of the contained food. However things like HFCS complicate things a bit, but for the most part, it would be quite helpful as shredded cheddar cheese is different from powedered cheddar cheese.
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The USDA has a fairly extensive database of nutritional data (per 100g unit) available for download at: http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=8964
It includes base ingredients (e.g. various cuts of meat), both cooked and uncooked. If you're looking for nutritional information or ideas on how to classify it, that may be a good place to start.
The data consists of multiple files - one per table - containing one record per line in a fixed width text format. It probably wouldn't be too difficult for someone with time on their hands to write an importer for freebase.
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