The Influence of City Size on Dietary Choices

Abstract

In the past decades, the process of urbanization has shaped general socio-economic aspects of cities with different population sizes. Among them, food consumption is a good indicator to reflect the quality of life. In this paper, we study the impact of city size on food preferences, as shown by users of a large German food sharing community. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyze differences in dietary choices made by users who indicate to live in cities of different sizes, from metropolises and big cities to medium and small towns. Further, we demonstrate that the city size of the creators of online recipes can be predicted with a good accuracy of 86%, using predictors based on recipe authors' profiles, recipe popularity, season, and recipe complexity and contents. The findings indicate that city size is a useful feature to take into account in various other domains.