USDA Food Desert Locator

Although the name of my blog is in regards to “Canadian Food Deserts”, I wanted to share this great tool that is available, even though it is only in regards to the United States.

            The US Department of Agriculture created an online map of the US, indicating areas all over the country where low-income families have little to no access to fresh, healthy food. It is called the Food Desert Locator. The USDA qualified an area as a food desert with the following criteria:

“To qualify as a low-income community, a census tract must have either: 1) a poverty rate of 20 percent or higher, OR 2) a median family income at or below 80 percent of the area’s median family income. To qualify as a low-access community, at least 500 people and/or at least 33 percent of the census tract's population must reside more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (for rural census tracts , the distance in more than one mile”.

It is pretty cool! Just like google maps you can click onto your area of interest, and the map shows statistic on the selected population .

Here’s what it looks like:

Now I can zoom in on any of the areas where research has been done, click on a region and I am provided with relevant statistics such as: how many children have inadequate access to food, percentage of people with low access. Etc.

What’s the point of a tool like this?

Ideally, it would be used to present data and information on food desert census tracts for optimizing community planning, policy-making, and agriculture. It can also be used for unending research purposes, to explore the possible solutions that are being proposed. It is part of the Obama administration’s 400 million dollar Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI). This initiative was launched with the goal of bringing grocery stores and other food retailers to under-served communities, to make healthy food more readily available [7]. As we already know, this issue cannot be solved with only one plan of action.

What about Canada? If this kind of tool proves to be useful in the US, maybe the government will provide funding for a similar initiative.

Thanks for reading,

Karoline