Food influences health.
Living near fast-food restaurants or healthy marketplaces influence people’s diets.
Using menus from thousands of restaurants in Dubai, we calculate a meal balance index of each meal, a measure of its nutritional quality

Leveraging the power of geo-located big data we study how the food landscape influence food consumption in 3 major cities

Average MBI

42.87 per serving
In Dubai, higher rental prices were slightly linked to lower levels of MBI, potassium, and vitamin D.
Colour Scale
The food landscape also shapes how we order,
revealing how it drives food delivery behavior across the city.
A localness index reveals how certain variables such as cost, wait time, and cuisine variety drive non-local ordering patterns
Credits
About

In Traveling Tastes we focus on how food landscapes influence health outcomes and how the availability and variety of restaurants influence food ordering behavior.


Obesity and cardio-metabolic diseases, exacerbated by poor dietary habits, are major public health issues. Nutritional data from restaurant menus in London, Boston, and Dubai were analyzed to explore the relationship between food landscapes, socioeconomic profiles, and health outcomes, such as neighborhoods at risk of obesity and cardio-metabolic diseases.


Complementing this health perspective, a second study investigates the travel distance and localness of food delivery in Dubai. It introduces a cuisine-aware localness index and applies Explainable AI to reveal insights into the variables that influence food ordering behavior, which includes cost, wait time, cuisine variety, and neighborhood cuisine variety.

People

Senseable City Lab

Carlo Ratti, director
Research
Fabio Duarte
Javad Eshtiyagh
Martina Mazzarello
Paolo Santi
Rongxiang Su
Alaa AlRadwan
Songhua Hu
Visualization
Chada Elalami

Wageningen University

Guido Camps
Michele Tufano

In partnership with

Publication

Tufano, M., Duarte, F., Mazzarello, M., Eshtiyagh, J., Ratti, C. and Camps, G., 2025. Data-Driven Nutritional Assessment of Urban Food Landscapes: Insights from Boston, London, and Dubai. Scientific Reports.


Su, R., Eshtiyagh, J., Santi, P., Hu, S., Duarte, F., Mazzarello, M. and Ratti, C., 2025. Determinants of the localized behavior of individual food delivery choices. Transportation Research Part C.


Press

Download the Press Material
The material on this website can be used freely in any publication provided that:
1. it is duly credited as a project by the MIT Senseable City Lab
2. a PDF copy of the publication is sent to senseable-press@mit.edu