Recipes for Disaster

I had no idea that the community of randomised culinary research was so fiercely competitive! It seems, though that Substance McGravitas -- hitherto ahead of the field with his Janusnode template -- cannot afford to rest on his bayleaves, for here is a group of brash young newcomers and their "10,000 randomized recipe datasets". Sadly, they do not report having tried any of these ingredient combinations.

Ahn, Ahnert, Bagrow & Barabási also provide a useful Fig 2 to show the molecular associations among no fewer than 381 culinary ingredients, but not including Figs, so no recursion chiz chiz.

The backbone of the flavor network. Each node denotes an ingredient, the node color indicates food category, and node size reflects the ingredient prevalence in recipes. Two ingredients are connected if they share a significant number of flavor compounds, link thickness representing the number of shared compounds between the two ingredients.

This cook only has 10 ingredients in his Flavour Network. No wonder he looks so dejected.

The top Figure looks like something the Pentagon might produce for a Congressional briefing, to dramatise the interconnectedness of terrorist groups.

But what is that in the centre of the spiderweb...

Run for your lives! It's a trap!