Are Food Ingredient Social? An Empirical Investigation

Understanding the structural organization of ingredient relationships within cuisines can reveal fundamental patterns in culinary traditions and ingredient co-occurrence. In this paper, we constructed ingredient networks (InNs) from two datasets of recipe ingredients that include recipes from 10 cuisines around the world. We then performed an empirical investigation of these multicuisine InNs to examine their structural characteristics. Our analysis demonstrates that networks exhibit scale-free behavior, with degree distributions following a power law characterized by exponents ranging from γ = 1.96 to γ = 2.38 . This further aligns with statistical validation, where the R -squa