USDA's new Food Environment Atlas
By geographically mapping indicators like “pounds of fruit/vegetables per capita” and “average monthly WIC participants,” the project enables policymakers and the general public to visualize the food environment, thereby helping to develop policy strategies that can improve food security and health in distressed areas across the country.
With such a tool, we can ask: where are the big gaps in service and access to healthy food, and how are those gaps affecting health? How are prices inhibiting the consumption of healthy food in many communities? Much of the map’s data focus on low-income communities, as does the First Lady’s entire childhood obesity project.
The Atlas summarizes a vast amount of data at the county, regional, and state levels. But in many ways, food security is a truly local issue – and at the moment, this tool is significantly limited in application at the local level. The smallest unit of measurement is the county – and this is especially problematic in DC, for example, where there is no distinction between sub-regions of the city. Therefore, if we’re looking at, say, the number of grocery stores per 1,000 people, we will get the same data point for all of DC – despite the fact that food environments vary widely throughout the District.
The limitation of local applicability becomes even more severe in cases where data is only available at the “regional” level. This puts DC in a category with some counties in MD and VA. These kinds of data include amounts of food eaten at home (fruits/veggies per capita, the ratio of fruits/veggies to prepared food, etc) and food prices (ratio of fruit prices to sweetened snack prices, ratio of whole grain prices to refined grain prices, etc).
The Atlas also uses the same level of indicator for all population densities across the nation – this is also a problem. In an urban area it is important to show the number of grocery stores per 10,000 people, while in rural area, that number of people will indicate a much broader swath of land. A useful tool would have to find a way to factor in population density.
All that being said, this is the first tool of its kind – and it’s encouraging to see the Federal government finally getting engaged in this way. The Atlas provides a promising base that could be developed into a truly powerful tool for policymakers and local change agents alike.
Nice work Tamma! Visualization is everything- very emblematic of the transparency movement
Awesome – thx for sharing. California looks pretty green!
Love, Maryn and Garry