Analysis and Prediction of Culinary Trends of Males from Rural and Urban India Post the Work From Home Culture with a Proposal of a Recipe Recommendation System

Cooking has traditionally been gendered across various Indian families, but there has been a shift in this pattern, with males increasingly partaking in the kitchen. The positive outcome of the pandemic-induced lockdowns is that it has made men realize their own culinary potentials and strengthened their cooking skills. Hence in this paper, I have analyzed the culinary trends of males from both rural and urban areas of India before the lockdown, during the lockdown and, whether these trends might change post the work from home/online education phase ends. Data was collected by 250 males filling up the 16-item online survey form. I have also built a prediction model that predicts if males would continue to cook post the work-from-home/online education phase ends based on a range of factors. Algorithms namely - KNN, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Booster, SVM, and Stacking Classifier were utilized. The highest accuracy obtained was 93.845% by using the Random Forest technique. Sentimental analysis was also performed on the reviews collected about their cooking experience during the lockdown. The findings after performing the sentimental analysis revealed that there were a larger number of positive reviews, which might imply that males loved their experience of acquiring or honing their culinary talents, and that cooking might have become a passion for them. As a practical outcome of this research study, I created a recipe recommendation system, as the findings of this study revealed that males desired to try cooking new dishes. This system is deployed in the form of a web application and it is extremely user-friendly and easy to operate.