Fast Food Visualizer

Fast Food Calorie Visualization
Wesley Grubbs (Aug, 2007)
Wes' Website | Wes' Email
Download AS3/XML source code

Fast food has become an integral part of modern day societies across the globe. The convenience of being able to order cheap, tasty food and divulge in it almost the instant you pay is unrelenting, and the fast food industry is has been continually growing at mezmarizing rates for the past quarter century. What I wanted to do in this experiment was find out just how much fast food taxes our health by visualizing something nearly all of us can understand: the amount of calories in one meal vs. our daily recommended value.

To obtain the data for this, I began by collecting both print and online data provided by fast food chains. Both sets of data are mostly in tabular and poor data-resultion form. There's no way a person can calculate the amount of calories they are cosuming with the same ease as ording their lunch.

Frustrated with the lack of decent practical tools to understand this information, I decided to spend an afternoon building a visualizer of my own of what I would consider to be an average meal in some of the more popular chains in North America.
For this first iteration, I am visualizing the calorie intake only and compairing that to the recommended daily intake of 2,000 calories. The results were not shocking, but more of a confirmation of what was before only assumed.

In the images below, the circles to the left represent individual food items, showing how, individually, they seem much smaller than their whole combined, which is depicted in the inner circle to the right. The red circle represents the total recommended daily caloric intake of 2,000 calories.

This is a visual description of how to read the dynamically generated images below:

Visual Description

Technical note: I am using Flash ActionScript 3 to render the graphics, XML to contain the datasets and E4X to parse the XML. All source code and sample datasets can be downloaded here. I encourage anyone interested to take this code and build onto it.

Usage note: Please note that this information was obtained via publicly accessible sources be each respective company. The meals selected in each display are single meals only and were selected at my discretion and do not reflect the overall mean of each company equally. This, however, may be in my next iteration :)
Feel free to download the source code and take this further. If you do so, please share your code further.

Burger King

DOUBLE WHOPPER® with Cheese (373 cal)
Large French Fries (500 cal)
Ketchup packets (*2) (20 cal)
Large Coke (290 cal)