Background: The COVID-19 pandemic affects all aspects of human life including their food consumption. The changes in the food production and supply processes introduce changes to the global dietary patterns. Scope and Approach: To study the COVID-19 impact on food consumption process, we have analyzed two data sets that consist of food preparation recipes published before (69,444) and during the quarantine (10,009) period. Since working with large data sets is a time-consuming task, we have applied a recently proposed artificial intelligence approach called DietHub. The approach uses the recipe preparation description (i.e. text) and automatically provides a list of main ingredients annotated using the Hansard semantic tags. After extracting the semantic tags of the ingredients for every recipe, we have compared the food consumption patterns between the two data sets by comparing the relative frequency of the ingredients that compose the recipes. Key Findings and Conclusions: Using the AI methodology, the changes in the food consumption patterns before and during the COVID-19 pandemic are obvious. The highest positive difference in the food consumption can be found in foods such as “Pulses/ plants producing pulses”, “Pancake/Tortilla/Outcake”, and “Soup/pottage”, which increase by 300%, 280%, and 100%, respectively. Conversely, the largest decrease in consumption can be food for food such as “Order Perciformes (type of fish)”, “Corn/cereals/grain”, and “Wine-making”, with a reduction of 50%, 40%, and 30%, respectively. This kind of analysis is valuable in times of crisis and emergencies, which is a very good example of the scientific support that regulators require in order to take quick and appropriate response.

The existence of annotated text corpora is essential for the development of public health services and tools based on natural language processing (NLP) and text mining. Recently organized biomedical NLP shared tasks have provided annotated corpora related to different biomedical entities such as genes, phenotypes, drugs, diseases and chemical entities. These are needed to develop named-entity recognition (NER) models that are used for extracting entities from text and finding their relations. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are limited annotated corpora that provide information about food entities despite food and dietary management being an essential public health issue. Hence, we developed a new annotated corpus of food entities, named FoodBase. It was constructed using recipes extracted from Allrecipes, which is currently the largest food-focused social network. The recipes were selected from five categories: ‘Appetizers and Snacks’, ‘Breakfast and Lunch’, ‘Dessert’, ‘Dinner’ and ‘Drinks’. Semantic tags used for annotating food entities were selected from the Hansard corpus. To extract and annotate food entities, we applied a rule-based food NER method called FoodIE. Since FoodIE provides a weakly annotated corpus, by manually evaluating the obtained results on 1000 recipes, we created a gold standard of FoodBase. It consists of 12 844 food entity annotations describing 2105 unique food entities. Additionally, we provided a weakly annotated corpus on an additional 21 790 recipes. It consists of 274 053 food entity annotations, 13 079 of which are unique. The FoodBase corpus is necessary for developing corpus-based NER models for food science, as a new benchmark dataset for machine learning tasks such as multi-class classification, multi-label classification and hierarchical multi-label classification. FoodBase can be used for detecting semantic differences/similarities between food concepts, and after all we believe that it will open a new path for learning food embedding space that can be used in predictive studies.