Across from the Short Stop gas station on Marshbanks Street in Buies Creek, North Carolina, Mostashari Food Distribution (MFD) operates a food delivery service covering the Carolinas and southern Virginia. To stay competitive in the market, MFD closely follows global food prices. The dataset they use is assembled monthly by the United Nations’ World Food Program (https://www.wfp.org/) and is distributed by HDX (https:// data.humdata.org/) to, among other places, here: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/salehahmedrony/global-food-prices.

The dataset is updated monthly and has 18 columns and more than 1.048M rows. 

Discussion Questions and Tasks 

1. Download the current month’s dataset and describe each of the 18 columns. 

2. Using R (or other data analytics software as the file is too big for Excel©) provides summaries of the numeric columns (e.g., average, median, and sample standard deviation).