A Food Atlas Like You've Never Seen

Have you ever wondered what areas have the most fast-food restaurants? How about the best access to grocery stores? Which parts of our country exercise the most and who consumes the highest amount of fats?

Thanks to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's handy new on-line Food Environment Atlas, you can map all sorts of statistics about food, health and well-being. The goal of the atlas is to gather information about food environment indicators in the hopes that it will ignite more research into what we choose to eat and why. The atlas also provides an actual map of how healthy a community is, based on a number of factors that you can select. So how does it work?

Broadly, it's divided into three categories. The first is food choices, which looks at things like access to grocery stores, how many restaurants are in the area, how much are people spending on fast food, how much does food cost, are local foods available and are there food assistance programs.

The second category is health and well-being. It examines the rates of food insecurity, diabetes, obesity, and how much people are being physically active.

And lastly, it figures in human characteristics, such as income, race, number of recreation and fitness centers, rural versus urban and natural amenities. Overall it takes into account some 90 different indicators, which you can click on and they're displayed on a colorful map.

There are endless queries you can make. For instance, the areas eating the most amount of meat and poultry are the mid-Atlantic and parts of California. Who's eating the most fats? Overwhelmingly high across the Great Plains, Midwest and Northeast. Where are the highest rates of food insecurity for kids? North Carolina, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, New Mexico, California and Oklahoma. The list goes on.

What's not great is that it's not easy to overlay multiple indicators on the map — say, to look at the correlation between income and availability of grocery stores. There is an "advanced query tool" but it's clunky and doesn't have the usability that the basic atlas search has. Still, the maps are a great way to begin to look at the various disparities that exists in our country when it comes to what we eat. Share your interesting finds in the comments.

Photo credit: naotakem