For most Nigerians, when they consider what to eat as lunch, their first consideration is either the Yoruba delicacy called efo riro or jollof rice. This is according to research by Pyszne.pl, an online food ordering and delivery company in Poland.
The research shows that the two dishes are the most preferred because of their warm colour tones - red, yellow, green and beige - achieved using ingredients like tomatoes, vegetables, spices, meat, spinach, suya and red oil.
Based on this, the study concluded that Nigeria’s food colour palette is made up of red and yellow, especially lunchtime meals.
Pyszne.pl wanted to know the colour hues that most dominate the lunch palette of countries worldwide. The investigation was inspired by another study published in the Biomed Central Journal in April 2015 that concluded that food colour is the strongest sensory stimulus when it comes to creating expectations about the taste of a dish.
The Pyszne.pl study was able to reveal the lunchtime colour palettes of 151 countries across the world, including South Africa (dark browns, peaches beige), Canada (red, pink and yellow), the US (green), and the UK (red, green and white).
To arrive at the result, Pyszne.pl analyzed over three million restaurant reviews from 151 countries sourced from a reputable restaurant review site.
“First of all, based on our sample, we wanted to determine which dish is mentioned the most often in each country. On this basis, we developed a frequency distribution and identified the dominant dish by searching an internal database of over 14,000 dishes from all over the world.” Pyszne.pl said. “Before starting the analysis, various methods of text normalization were used to reduce the time needed for calculations and increase their accuracy, e.g. non-informative words were removed and tokenization was performed.”
When it came to the content analysis, Pyszne.pl prioritized dishes that could be served as lunch, looking out for those with specific colours.
“Based on the content analysis, we obtained a data set that is a source of knowledge about the most popular lunch dishes in each of the surveyed countries. The next step was to use a special shade recognition tool, thanks to which we formally determined the multimodal intensity distribution of the primary colours (red, green and blue) in the photos of individual dishes," Pyszne.pl said.
"The five shades that were most clearly visible on the distribution were considered typical of the dish and used to create a map showing the most dominant colours in the lunch palette of each country. Countries with inconclusive results or with too small a sample size are not included.”
Read the full report here: https://www.pyszne.pl/odkryj/mapa-barw-jedzenia/
