The contribution of network science to the study of food recipes. A review paper.

Recently, scholars have applied network science, which examines interconnected systems, to the study of food recipes. By examining the current literature, this review paper analyses the contribution of network science to recipes, and finds evidence of two main contributions. First, the pioneer studies showed the potential of network science for reducing the complexity of recipes and proposing theories to model ingredient pairings and recipe evolution. The second contribution built upon the previous theories and expanded them to cover different regions of the world as the field moved towards understanding the granularity of human culture with rich and detailed studies that examine different cuisines as more recipe datasets became available. Network science studies of recipes allowed researchers to discover insights in recipes to explain sociocultural aspects of cuisines, and include large numbers of recipes in the analysis, which would be nearly impossible using other techniques.