Map: Do You Live in a Food Desert? USDA's Food Desert Locator
Map Yesterday, the United States Department of Agriculture
unveiled its latest online tool: an eye-opening map of the
nation's "food deserts." These food deserts (marked in pink
above) are places where there is "low income" and "low
access"—or places where at least a fifth of the population lives
at or below the poverty line and where there isn't a supermarket
within a one-mile radius (or within a 10-mile radius in rural
areas). All things told, about 13.5 million people nationwide
have little or no access to stores selling healthful food. The
complete dataset is downloadable, so it should spawn mash-ups.
The USDA has also created the Food Environment Atlas, which maps
factors ranging from food taxes to farmers' markets (below).
What correlations can we make about the absence of food deserts
and farmers' markets? The data's impressive and certainly opens
up opportunities to map other connections: What's the impact of
healthy corner stores, walkable