My research question is “What is the distribution of my food expenses based on the food types?”. I started with the question that “ What kind of food do I shop the most from my local market?”. I was also thinking to analyze the frequency of shopping for certain food types. But when I started to analyze my data, it made more sense to see the food types I shop usually for and the distribution of expenses.
My goal is to illustrate the pattern in my food shopping regarding the food types and the expenses, so I can make better decisions in my future shopping considering my budget and the healthy diet requirements for my family. Another reason is that I find the vegetable and fruits prices high, so I wanted to see how much I spend specifically on them.
I collected my data from the receipts of my market shopping for my five people family by date at first for around a month. Then, I rearranged the table by transposing it to be able to get a bar chart to compare the food types.
I created a bar chart to see my expenses in different food types.
The chart shows that my most expenses are for seafood and for meat. Because I think vegetables and fruits are expensive, so I was trying to save some from them. This visualization tells me that I can be more flexible on spending more on them considering the importance of vegetables and fruits in a healthy diet.
When I consider a healthy diet, I should analyze the trade-offs of spending on processed foods and the time I spend on food preparation.
I recorded the estimated time when I prepared food to illustrate the consumed time with different food types in preparation.
We all know that processed foods are not the best choices for our health. However, preparing processed foods usually takes less time than fresh foods or cooking dried beans. To make a better decision in my diet, I should consider the trade-offs between using fresh foods and processed foods considering the time spent on food preparation, cost, and the effects of foods I choose on my body.
To get a better picture of my spending on food, I grouped some food types and compared the total spendings on them.
The chart shows that I spend more on seafood and red meat.
To make a better decision for a healthy diet, I should continue to collect more data and visualize it. Because in my present data I didn’t include all of my shopping, like beverages, packed foods and etc., it doesn’t show the whole picture. If I expand this project, it would help me to make rearrangements in my shopping pattern and control my budget and time management.
