GraphJam Side A · Music & pop culture in charts
The Plate Archive25 charts

Food and Drink, in Charts

The one subject where a pie chart has a defensible claim to be the right diagram.

Twenty-five charts about eating, and the collection has an advantage no other one here does: its subject is genuinely divisible. A meal, a packet, a plate and a dinner are all whole things made of parts, which means that for once the pie chart is not a borrowed authority. It is the right diagram.

The archive knows this. Its single most-cited chart of all is a photograph of a lemon pie with one slice removed, filed under Charts About Charts because what it is really about is the format.

The one real dataset

M&M Color Distribution is the collection’s outlier: an actual count of an actual population, performed by a reader with a packet. It is linked from two sites, and at least one of them arrived from somebody comparing the drawn ratios to the manufacturer’s published ones. That is a chart being used as evidence, which almost nothing else in this archive can claim.

Meals at Our House and My Cooking are the domestic equivalents — self-reported counts over a real period, with the categories chosen by the person doing the cooking.

Single-variable models of taste

tastiness vs area of sandwich is the clearest example of the collection’s other mode: propose one explanatory variable for a judgement that has many, plot it confidently, and let the reader supply the objection. Burgers by Location does it with geography. How Food Looks does it with presentation. Snack Food and Things that Reportedly Taste Like Chicken are both taxonomies rather than models, and the chicken one is the funniest, because the category is defined entirely by comparison to a thing outside it.

Why people buy foods with “50% Less Fat” is the sharpest chart here. It plots motivation rather than nutrition, and the dominant slice is not health. It is a chart about marketing that happens to be filed under food.

Drink, coffee and the working day

Make More Coffee is a decision procedure. Coffee Venndor holds two referring domains for a pun that required drawing overlapping sets to work at all. Why you drink, filed under the machines, because of what it blames, belongs with them in spirit. “Extreme” Mountain Dew Drinkers by Demographic and Snapple Ingredients both plot a product’s marketing against its contents, and the Snapple one holds three sites still link to it, the highest count in this collection’s neighbourhood.

But It’s the Only One with Tea Time from October 2010 is the last recovered chart here, and one of the last in the archive at all.

Meals as arithmetic

The remaining group treats food logistics as a scheduling problem. Will my kids eat this? is a probability. Thanksgiving Dinner sizes is a growth curve. Silverware in Conjunction is a combinatorial chart about cutlery. Reasons to Do the Dishes and What people do immediately after driving away from the Drive-Thru plot the moments either side of the meal rather than the meal, which, on the evidence of this collection, is where most of the actual comedy of eating lives.

Charts here
25
Images recovered
14
Published as plates
0
Referring domains
28
First posted
Apr 2008
Last posted
Oct 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    Relative amount I am tempted by various fruits

    · image not recovered

  2. A2

    Make More Coffee

    · Drawn by Eric B

  3. A3

    Number Of Tourists Eaten By Attraction

    · image not recovered

  4. A4

    Places to Buy a Vegemite Sandwich

    · Drawn by Ben Brandt

  5. A5

    Things that Reportedly Taste Like Chicken

    · Drawn by L. Stevenson · image not recovered

  6. A6

    leading cause of death, jack-o-lanterns

    · Drawn by kaycem

  7. A7

    Meals at Our House

    · Drawn by GillE

  8. A8

    Will my kids eat this?

    · Drawn by mythago · image not recovered

  9. A9

    M&M Color Distribution

    · 2 domains still link here

  10. A10

    Probability of this making you want Pizza

    · Drawn by paladinoj

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    Food Chain

    · Drawn by kojak

  13. B2

    Reasons to Do the Dishes

    · Drawn by HeidiKaye · image not recovered

  14. B3

    Why people buy foods with “50% Less Fat”

  15. B4

    Snack Food

    · Drawn by bluewolf482 · image not recovered

  16. B5

    tastiness vs area of sandwich

    · Drawn by cauelaratta

  17. B6

    Burgers by Location

  18. B7

    Silverware in Conjunction

    · Drawn by imdamoos

  19. B8

    How Food Looks

    · Drawn by Alcnor · image not recovered

  20. B9

    My Cooking

    · Drawn by Villiers

  21. B10

    Thanksgiving Dinner sizes

    · image not recovered

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    Airplane seating

    · Drawn by cRiS0078 · image not recovered

  24. C2

    What people do immediately after driving away from the Drive-Thru

    · image not recovered

  25. C3

    What I Do When I Can’t Beat A Level In A Video Game

    · Drawn by terencewise93

  26. C4

    Coffee Venndor

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  27. C5

    But It’s the Only One with Tea Time

    · 2 domains still link here

Queries answered

What is in the Food and Drink collection?

Twenty-five charts about meals, snacks, drinks and cooking, drawn between April 2008 and October 2010. Fourteen still have their recovered image.

Which is the most rigorous chart here?

M&M Color Distribution, from February 2009. It is a real distribution of a real countable population, and it is linked from two sites — several of them from people checking the published ratios against it.

Is there a chart about sandwiches?

tastiness vs area of sandwich, from May 2009, which proposes a single-variable model for a judgement that obviously has more than one variable. That is the joke, and it is the same joke a great deal of published nutrition research makes in earnest.

Why does food suit the pie chart?

Because a meal is a genuine whole divided into parts, which is the only situation where a pie chart is the correct choice. Most of the archive borrows the format; here it fits, and the archive’s most cited chart of all is a photograph of an actual pie.

Why are some entries listed without an image?

The original images were hosted on a service that now returns an error for every one, did not survive on its original host. Where no copy survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address.