I'm making a recipe app. It will let users create their own recipes, and to save them the hassle of writing ingredient names their selves it would be nice to do a search in a database instead. Do anyone know if there exists a dataset with this data anywhere?
example data: Lettuce, Salmon, Strawberries, Minced meat, Salt, Cinnamon
I think USDA.gov's NDB (full name: USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference) would get you what you need.
Download links and data metadata is available on the "About the Database" file at http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=8964. If you're looking solely for a list of food items, the latest Food Descriptions file is at http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/80400525/Data/SR27/asc/FOOD_DES.txt
There are many sites such as nutritionix.com, etc. which have APIs and have added additional commercial off the shelf ingredients like packaged goods, etc. too though so you might look into a more refined/complete collection as well. See http://www.nutritionix.com/api for information about their API.
Open Food Facts is producing a crowdsourced ingredient lists. It's OdBL. Read the licence, but basically: Attribution and you need to share back your additions under OdBL. http://world.openfoodfacts.org/ingredients.json
Everything you mentioned is available in Wikidata, which is CC 0 and multi-lingual. The hard part would to limit your data to just ingredients since it contains much more, but selecting of only things that are subclasses or instances of food might be a good start.
FooDB is the world’s largest and most comprehensive resource on food constituents, chemistry and biology. It provides information on both macronutrients and micronutrients, including many of the constituents that give foods their flavor, color, taste, texture and aroma
Inventory of Cosmetic Ingredients as amended by Decision 2006/257/EC establishing a common nomenclature of ingredients employed for labelling cosmetic products throughout the EU. if you want know about salad nutrition facts, click here.
