The image above is a poster from artist Justin Perricone. It’s the first in a series designed to show you what’s in the food that you’re eating. For this particular poster, he took all of the ingredients that are in a Ham and Cheese Pizza Pocket and arranged them into this design. Looking at this could definitely make at least a few of us think twice about putting that food into our bodies.

And the poster got me thinking about how you could use tag clouds to actually analyze what is in the food that you are eating. If you’re familiar with the food rules popularized by Michael Pollan, you know that one of the most important things that you can do if you want to eat a healthy, natural diet is to avoid eating foods that have more than five ingredients and foods that contain anything that you can’t pronounce. This makes sense but it’s tough to get used to and I think tag clouds could help.

Here’s how:

Pull out an item from your pantry that you eat on a regular basis. Copy the ingredients into a document on your computer. Now, the way that tag cloud programs work is that the more frequently a word is used, the bigger or bolder it will appear in the tag cloud. Luckily, the ingredients in your food are listed in order of how much of them is in your food. You won’t get anything exact, of course, since you don’t know the percentage of each ingredient in the food, but you can get a general idea by copy-pasting the leading ingredients multiple times into your document.

For example, here are the ingredients for my supposedly healthy cereal bars; they’re in order although I’ve separated the outside part from the inside filling:

enriched flour, oat bran, canola oil, raisin paste, liquid whole eggs, molasses, glycerin, oat fiber, brown sugar, liquid invert sugar, baking powder, vitamins, minerals, wheat bran, salt, cellulose, honey, sodium bicarbonate, sodium propionate, niacinamide, zinc oxide, reduced iron, calcium carbonate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin, folic acid

fructose, high fructose corn syrup, strawberries, sugar, glycerin water, maltodextrin, modified corn starch, sodium alginate, natural flavor, artificial flavor, calcium chloride, citric acid, malic acid, sodium citrate, xanthum gum, caramel color

Now, to keep things super simple, I’ve entered these into a tag cloud program. I’ve taken the first five ingredients from each part of the list and copy-pasted them five extra times. Then I’ve taken the following five ingredients and entered them an extra three times. Then I generated my tag cloud. Here’s the result:

Granted, this isn’t an exact science but it certainly gives me a decent picture of what I’m putting in my body. And I definitely think the process of doing this will make me think twice about frequently consuming some of the foods in my pantry!

If you try this, please come back and leave me a comment … I’d love to know how it works out for other people!!!

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Tags: diet, Food, healthy, ingredients, tag clouds