A text mining of school lunch recipes in Japan and correlation between lunch dishes and nutrition balance

Abstract

In Japan, school lunch is usually provided by the governmental agency and the lunch is called “Kyusyoku”. The recipes of Kyusyoku is consulted by dietitians to balance nutrition for the health of childhood. We have analyzed Kyusyoku recipes. The recipe consists of texts of dishes and ingredients including nutrition data. For over 13 years of recipe data, we have made clusters of dishes. Then, each cluster represents the kind of dishes. In addition, comparing the clusters and their ingredients, there is high correlation between the distance of clusters and the divergence of ingredients distribution. Since, ingredients directly affect nutrition, there is high correlation between the kind of lunch dishes and nutrition.