Food Pairing Diagrams

Foodpairing is a web site with an unusual premise: it seeks to visually describe the flavor relationships between a set of foods. By analyzing a set of 250 food products' flavors (or rather, the chemicals that make up those flavors), the site is able to demonstrate flavor in a sort of relational tree. Here's a partial view of the Basil diagram:

Here's a bit more information about the site:

- FOOD IS INTERCHANGEABLE - A food product has a specific flavour because of a combination of different flavours. Like basil taste like basil because of the combination of linalool, estragol, "¦. So if I want to reconstruct the basil flavour without using any basil, you have to search for a combination of other food products where one contains linalool (like coriander), one contains estragol (like tarragon),... So I can reconstruct basil by combining coriander, tarragon, cloves, laurel. The way to use it is to take from each branch of the plot one product and make a combination of those food products.

(Via Kottke.org.)