Getting the Data
The USDA National Nutrient Database is the standard reference for nutritional contents of food in the United States.
The data is structured as a fact table of nutrient quantities and lookup tables for food/nutrient descriptions. The data comes in a CSV format with the following variations:
- Tildes ~ are used instead of quotes “
- Carets ^ are used instead of commas ,
To get started quickly, export from the Nutrient Explorer. This CSV will contain the food names and nutrient headers in a standard CSV format suitable to loading into a visualization with d3.csv
Potential Discussion Topics
What kinds of visualizations could be generated from this dataset to contribute to discussions about data and nutrition?
Creating a Visualization
Link to examples of USDA visualizations here
Further Reading
Wikipedia articles, papers, blog posts about the dataset