Subject	Social Sciences (General)
Specific subject area	Expert elicitation used to capture the diversity and cultural drivers of food choice and nutritional implications [2,3]
Type of data	Table
How data were acquired	The data were acquired through expert elicitation workshops in the states of Odisha and West Bengal in eastern India, following the Gastronomic Systems Research (GSR) framework [2,3]. In each expert elicitation workshop, the food experts were tasked with specific exercises to identify eating occasions, common dishes for each occasion, and ingredients that would be typically consumed by the target population following a standard structure of individual, intra-team, and inter-team elicitation methods. To estimate the nutritional composition, the dishes that made the final list were standardized and prepared in a food laboratory. Each dish was then classified into a food group according to its most prominent ingredient: starches, vegetables, non-vegetable (i.e., meat, fish, egg), pulses, fruits, and dairy.
Data format	Raw Analyzed
Parameters for data collection	Experts from the fields of study on nutrition, home science, food technology, and food service industry were invited to the workshops. They were identified mainly based on overall knowledge about the food consumption and culture of the target population in the state where they practice their professions.
Description of data collection	Social scientists from the International Rice Research Institute facilitated the expert elicitation workshops, following the GSR framework [2] and guided by a protocol [3]. The basic approach of the process was to facilitate system-level thinking, active engagement in individual- and group-level discussions, encourage out-of-the box thinking, and consensus building. West Bengal was then selected for further in-depth study and the expert from University of Calcutta refined the list of dishes captured by the experts in the Kolkata workshop and conducted the nutritional analysis.
Data source location	Country: India City/Town/Region: Kolkata, West Bengal and Bhubaneswar, Odisha
Data accessibility	In a public repository:Repository name: Harvard Dataverse List of dishes and ingredients from expert elicitation workshop [4]: • Data identification number: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/CRQFBO • Direct URL to data: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/CRQFBO Database of eastern Indian dishes [5]: • Data identification number: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SRM5GA • Direct URL to data: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/SRM5GA
Related research article	Samaddar, A., Cuevas, R. P., Custodio, M. C., Ynion,  J., Ray (Chakravarti), A., Mohanty, S. K. and Demont, M. Capturing diversity and cultural drivers of food choice in eastern India. International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, 22 (2020) 100249. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijgfs.2020.100249