Where can I find a text list or library that contains a list of common foods? [closed]

Answer 1

It would be really nice to have all the food items into one single list but sadly that's the ideal case.

You can try accessing the food synset in WordNet. If you are using NLTK, try:

>>> from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
>>> food = wn.synset('food.n.02')
>>> list(set([w for s in food.closure(lambda s:s.hyponyms()) for w in s.lemma_names()]))

Answer 2

AFAIK, there is no entity of common foods for NLTK or similar. It's quite likely you have to construct a list for yourself.

But, thankfully, the internet is your friend, here are a few good sources to start with that cover a lot of common vegetables and fruits in the English-speaking world:

• http://vegetablesfruitsgrains.com/list-of-vegetables/
• http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/features/fruitvegindex.html
• http://www.enchantedlearning.com/wordlist/vegetables.shtml

Good luck!

Answer 3

Since named entities are proper nouns (i.e. people, places, companies, locations, etc.), it's unlikely that NLP entity extraction will work for finding common food names. The NLP function that might work is keyword extraction. I ran a few recipes through AlchemyAPI's demo and the ingredients are identified as keywords. So that gets you part of the way there, but you'll still need to compare the keywords to a list of common food items, like jrd1 mentioned.