I've taken the [Epicurious recipe data][1] and sorted all of the recipe categories into a set of 30 "meta-categories" to help make some sense of the recipe data. I ended up with a python dictionary of the meta-categories, so I turned it into a python function (called "get_categories") that finds meta-categories given a list of categories. The function also returns a list of all metacategories if the string 'get_keys' is passed in as an argument, and the entire dictionary if the string 'get_dict' is passed in. [1]: https://www.kaggle.com/hugodarwood/epirecipes