Making Better Maps of Food Deserts Neighborhoods with little or
no access to healthful food can be located and studied using GIS
mapping Food deserts—areas where consistent access to healthful
food is limited or nonexistent—have gained attention recently.
Michelle Obama has launched an initiative to end them in the
United States by 2017. But in many areas, we still lack
comprehensive, fine-grain knowledge of where food access is most
challenging. “It’s something that kind of snuck up on us as a
scientific community,” says Kirk Goldsberry, a professor in the
Department of Geography at Michigan State University. Goldsberry
and his colleagues Chris Duvall and Phil Howard, also of MSU,
have made a new series of maps showing access to fresh produce
in the Lansing, Michigan, area. The team wanted to measure food
access using a deeper level of data than is often available. So,
Goldsberry says, they visited every fresh-produce retailer in
the area, locating 447 distinct produce items for sale. Then,
using GIS (Geogra