Attributes specifying whether a food is vegan or vegetarian for certain USDA FDC FoodData datasets.
Inspired from v3gtb
The aim of this project is to provide free and open add-on data for the USDA’s FDC FoodData datasets containing attributes that categorize foods as vegan, vegetarian, or neither.
This will hopefully enable applications and services that deal with nutrition data to take these dietary preferences into account, e.g. when displaying or suggesting foods to users. The target audience of this project are mainly small open source projects, although nothing keeps you from using it in a commercial project (see the License section below).
The data are generated using a naive heuristic based only on the descriptions of each food and those of its ingredients, which are compared to hardcoded lists of phrases and the most likely categories they suggest. Neither this approach nor the lists of phrases are perfect, so there are still many incorrectly categorized foods that will hopefully become fewer over time.
For those foods whose categorization as vegan/vegetarian/omni depends on one’s
level of “strictness”, an attempt is made to classify them as an appropriate
composite category. E.g., wines should ideally all be categorized as
VEGAN_VEGETARIAN_OR_OMNI because certain filtration methods normally used in
the winemaking process involve animal
products, some of which
require killing the animal to extract, although it’s plausible that a subset of
vegans/vegetarians would consider them vegan/vegetarian regardless.
Note that these same composite categories are also used more generally in cases in which it’s impossible to tell from the available information whether something is vegan/vegetarian or not. Although this meaning is technically distinct from the strictness-dependent categorization above, in practice they tend to overlap almost perfectly. Returning e.g. to the example above, there do exist strictly vegan wines made without resorting to animal products in any step of the process, but a description saying just “wine” could refer to either these or the non-vegan variants.
Attributes are provided for foods in the FNDDS (“Survey”) and SR Legacy datasets. Data for both datasets are provided together in one file as foods are uniquely identified by e.g. their FDC ID and the file size is small anyway. As of now there are no plans to extend this project to the other FDC datasets, but who knows.
For debugging and demoing purposes, the current lists of foods in each category can be viewed here:
The script used to generate the data released by this project from FDC data via the heuristic explained above can be found in the project’s source code.
Some incomplete notes on development can be found here.
Like the USDA FDC datasets themselves, the data published by this project is hereby released into the public domain or, in jurisdictions where this is not possible, the closest legal equivalent.
The script to generate the data is provided under the MIT license.