We often hear stereotypes about food around the world: “American food contains more sugar and fat than other foods”, “Swiss people like to consume more local products than other people”, « European food is healthier than American food », etc. How true are these stereotypes? That’s what we wanted to find out.
In appearance globalization is getting stronger, but regarding food, should we not use the term ‘glocalisation’ instead? The term glocalisation would suggest a local adaptation of global products depending on consumers’ tastes. Indeed, even though in appearance we find almost the same products in supermarkets all around the world, are they ‘really’ the same? We wanted to verify, for example, the belief that the ‘same’ Coca-Cola bottle contains more sugar in America than in France. Then, we wanted to check if such a phenomenon is common and what the main differences between the countries are.
To perform this analysis, we used the OpenFactFood database. The OpenFactFood project gathers information and data on food products from all around the world. It was launched on 19th May 2012 by the French programmer Stéphane Gigandet, who wanted to offer more transparency to the consumers. His aim was to motivate the manufacturers to reduce salt, fat, and sugar content in food. Indeed, the more information the customers have access to regarding the content of a company’s products, the more that company will have to pay attention to the healthiness of their products. This project was highly motivated by the health problems caused by poor alimentation. In fact, since 1975, the number of obese people in the world has tripled. In 2016, more than 1.9 billions of adult people (over 18 years old) were overweight, including 650 millions of obese people. Indeed, the number of products proposed in supermarkets was always increasing, and people were more and more tempted to consume them. People were not really paying attention to added sugar, salt, and everything that could create a good taste and make people more addicted, sometimes because of hidden information. That is why it is really important to alert people and make them aware of the quality of the products they consume and give to their child.
OpenFactFood is a project developed by thousands of volunteers from all around the world. Everyone has free access both to the website and to the application, and can contribute by adding a product from their kitchen.
The origin and manufacturing places of products were also very interesting for ecological reasons. Indeed, the more products travel, the more pollution there is in the world. Also, when people are always buying products from far away countries, they tend to forget what fruit and vegetables are in season and thus keep buying out of season products, and so the environmental impact is constantly getting worse.
Finally, that also creates bad concurrence for local farmers.
ADA project 2018