Visualizing 40 Years of the American Diet

What’s for dinner? The answer’s changed a lot since 1970. You can survey the shifts in a matter of seconds now that Nathan Yau of FlowingData has created a viz that tracks Americans’ daily intakes over four decades.

Using data from the USDA, Yau built an interactive that charts the average daily consumption, per person, of various kinds of meats, vegetables, fruits, grains, dairy products, and fat sources. As the viz chugs along, readers get an overview of what waned in popularity and what surged ahead. (Apples, for instance, remain the go-to fruit, but chicken blew past beef as the meat of choice.) Though Yau doesn’t delve into causality, some upticks and tumbles seem likely to map on to broader cultural shifts.