With that attitude, you’re missing out on the cultural and historical significance of food and ingredients.

Food tells so many stories. Pepper usage could tell you things if you’re combining it with other data. There’s a lot there, with such a simple data point — class, race, ethnicity, technology, famine, publishing trends, economic output, agricultural history, climate, trends in taste — so much!

Food history is not just for academic researchers.

I was just thinking the other day that’d it’d be interesting to be able to see what ingredients are used with eachother most often.

Say for instance, you bought ground cumin for some recipe, and now you have a bunch left and dunno what to add it to.

You could try randomly adding it or a database like this might give you some pretty interesting results.

Food has a value on its own to a vast number of people. I would argue there are far more cooks than baseball fans.

This isn’t about Food. It’s about a question such as “During which decade black pepper was the most popular?”

Perhaps you can find more use cases for it? I can’t think of

This is a funny argument because I can certainly imagine myself giving baseball statistics as a prime example of huge effort going into collecting “useless” data! (Unless you manage a baseball team.) I don’t see how your question is less interesting than “who had the 43rd highest batting average in 1934?”, which I’m sure there are multiple places to look up.