API that matches food names to categories

Question

I am using an API that provides a load of nutritional information for food, for example calories, protein, etc. However what it does not provide is any sort of categorization of that food. Can anyone recommend a database or API, free or paid, that would allow me to match food names to general categories (like meat, fruit, vegetable, etc)? I am thinking if this is not in the food-database related space perhaps it's in some kind of text processing or NLP library I might not be familiar with?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Answer 1

All the information in this answer was provided in the comments section by Barry Carter. I'm just putting it an answer because comments can be arbitrarily deleted and the information lost.

• USDA Food Composition Databases: Page 35 of Composition of Foods Raw, Processed, Prepared; USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 28 (2015); Documentation and User Guide notes that the "FdGrp_Cd" field should have this value. It also shows up when you do simple web searches. Not sure about their API, but you can download the entire database if desired. The db is tiny (I think), fewer than 9000 foods, and you don't need all the tables.

• http://github.com/spbriggs/USDA-SR26/tree/master/sr26 may help

• http://directionsforme.org/categories may also help, though you'll have to tweak it some.