Indian Spices: Where Do They Go and Their Impact

This interactive visualization shows the importance of Indian spices by showing how widespread they are worldwide and how they are essential to global cuisine. How so many popular dishes are dependent on Indian exports.
You can see what spices are exported from India to a given country by clicking on your country of choice. The spice import data is a large sample of all the spices Volza.com has recorded from April 2016 to November 2022. The spices are ordered in terms of products imported. A product of a spice is a given product of that spice. For example a plastic container full of garam masala would be considered a single product. A given product does not have a given measurement in grams due to limitations in the import data. Fortunately displaying the products imported of a given spice suffices in finding the relative popularity of the spice. Especially given how one gram of a spice could be the equivalent of a twenty grams or more of another spice.
You have the choice to base the country color bindings off of either products imported or the number of spice import shipments from India received. An import shipment is simply a batch of products that a country received at one point. You also have the option to enable pan & zoom for the map. The panning is controlled by holding down left-click on the map and dragging your mouse cursor and the zoom-in is controlled using the scroll wheel.
This visualization also shows the top five most popular Indian dishes in the selected country based on the recorded import data. The dishes are ranked based on a ranking system described below.

Indian Spices: Where Do They Go and Their Impact

How the Most Popular Indian Dishes Are Determined

Each dish is given a rank when a country is selected. This rank is determined by checking the recipe of each dish with each spice the country has import data for and increasing the rank for each spice found in the recipe. The amount of rank increase per spice is determined by the spice's placement when ordering the spices from most to least products imported. If a spice is first on this list then the rank increase is equal to the number of spices imported. Then the next spice in the list would give a rank increase of one minus the number of spices imported. The last spice in the list can only give a rank increase of one.
The five dishes with the highest rank are then written to the screen in order from highest to lowest rank.

Created By

Steven Lassen (slassen@ucsc.edu)
Vamsi Garlapati (vgarlapa@ucsc.edu)
In collaboration with Professor Suresh Lodha and Jacob Low

Designed For

University of California, Santa Cruz
CSE 163: Data Programming for Visualization
Fall 2022

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