Food Environment Atlas

Apparently with fanfare from the first lady (still looking for an online reference or link to said fanfare) the USDA Economic Research Service has unleashed Your Food Environment Atlas which is intended to allow us to "get a spatial overview of a community's ability to access healthy food and its success in doing so." Well, I'm not sure it lives up to all that hype - certainly there are some things missing or analyses that should be done - but this is a decently slick online viewer that allows a user to dynamically map a national dataset that was compiled from different relevant sources. I particular appreciate the ability to see the actual values or to do an advanced query (which are effectively low-level GIS capabilities).

Of course, what I was waiting for was simply the underlying tabular spreadsheet database upon which the Food Environment Atlas is built. And this is indeed available for download which I did (especially since everyone was trying to use the mapper at the same time yesterday and it was a little sluggish). So it will be interesting to explore this data but one of the first things I decided to do was to just whip up static versions of maps made for Michigan counties from these Food Environment Atlas variables (downloaded 9 February 2010). I copied each variable description directly from the online atlas documentation and pasted it onto each corresponding map. So these maps may be useful in situations and settings where you don't have access to the dynamic online national version or want to show just Michigan counties and specific variables. Download static Food Environment Atlas for Michigan counties as a PDF (~35MB download, 108 pages).


While you are at it you may also be interested in Michigan Food and Agricultural Systems Profiles for each county. Shout out to Rachel Chadderdon who helped compile these during her internship last summer at the Michigan Department of Agriculture and who is helping us plan Local Food Summit 2010.