World Food Map to be completed by 2023

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- The World Food Map will become the world’s largest list of what people eat, Agribusiness reported.

The Global Nutrition Quality Project (GDQP) is a collaboration between Gallup, the Harvard Department of Global Health and Population, and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). Through this project, researchers will create a "World Food Map" that brings together and visualizes information about eating patterns from around the world. The World Food Map is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

GDQP has developed both data and tools to ensure regular, reliable and comparable collection of dietary data across countries. The main instrument is the Diet Quality Questionnaire (DQQ), which takes five minutes but provides a wealth of information about dietary patterns at the population level. The DQQ is used to derive several measures of dietary quality associated with malnutrition in all its forms, including dietary diversity and risk factors for noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The questions collect information about the consumption of 29 food groups, including both healthy and unhealthy foods.

To create a country-specific questionnaire, the project team solicited information from people in each of the 104 countries to determine the most common products in each location. Overall, more than 750 people provided information on which products are most common and what they are called. This is the first attempt to collect systematic and comparable information about what people around the world eat.

The final map will be created by 2023 using DQQ data and will display this information in an engaging, interactive format, allowing viewers to virtually visit each country to learn about local food habits. The map will be accompanied by food composition data from the Food Initiative’s Periodic Table, which is also supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. This data will provide important information about culturally acceptable ways to improve nutritional quality.